With all of the Maggie O'Farrell I've read over the years, how did I miss her first novel? A beautifully written book.

"After You'd Gone," is a gracefully written novel, fast-paced, yet contemplative - about love, and family and grief. I'm still thinking about the ending - I think it is hopeful.

This is Maggie O’Farrell’s debut novel and the 4th I’ve read by her. I only read her for the first time last year, I don’t know why I’d never come across her before because she is a wonderful writer.After you’d gone is about Alice, a young Scottish woman living in London. The story jumps backwards and forwards in time, through points of view, and Alice in first person. It could be confusing but somehow it isn’t, it just made me want to read quicker so I could join all the threads.It’s main theme...

O'Farrell's debut novel piques your interest right away with young Alice experiencing a mystery "something" that unsettles her, followed by Alice being hit by a car and left in a coma. The rest of the book changes time frames and points of view to slowly unravel her history, exposing what brought her to this moment in her life. The content is part mystery, part love story, and part dramatic family conflict. We primarily get to know Alice, her mother, Ann, and her husband, John, although other fa...

From the beginning I wanted to know what the awful thing was that Alice sees that causes her to leave Scotland so abruptly after just arriving for a family visit. She’s in a coma, after being hit by a car as she reflects back on her life, her loves, her family, as she grieves a loss. The narrative moves back and forth from past to present, from first to third person, and the reflections are not just Alice’s. Maggie O’Farrell does this phenomenal thing by moving back and forth between different p...

“Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.” Julian of NorwichI was prepared for this not to be Maggie O’Farrell at her best. After all, it is her debut novel and she is bound to have gotten better over the years…right? Nope. She started out her writing career a full-blown amazement and never faltered afterward.This novel starts off with a bit of a mystery. Alice sees something while visiting her home in Scotland that makes her run back to London, and we

You know that rule some people have about reading 50 pages of a book and deciding whether to put it down or continue with it? Well I’m not sure if this would have made it if I were a stickler to that rule. Actually, writing that, I’m not sure exactly which page it was that made me realize I liked this book. But I do know that I mostly muddled my way through the first lot of pages. The narration confused me a little. Multiple points of view, different periods of time. It was as if the pieces of t...

I feel as though a cloud has been lifted, now that I've finished this book. That's not to say I didn't like it, but Maggie O'Farrell manages to create such an intense atmosphere, I felt almost exhausted reading it. I feel i am giving an unfair impression of this book. It's a mix of mystery, thriller, romance... and I cannot possibly assign it to a single genre. Alice, the central figure in this story, ends up in a coma after witnessing a mysterious incident when she goes to visit her family. O'F...

This one was depressing. Accurate in its portrayal of grief. Above average wordcraft but this is the one book of hers that, to me, became a trudge read. Too much frenetic time and narrator hopping for my taste. Despite all, she encapsulates emotional climates superbly here. Tense and stressful (eternally sad or depressed) over all possible types of happy or joyful states in an exhausting miasma!

"Sliding between different levels of consciousness, Alice listens to the conversations around her, and begins sifting through recollections of her past, and of a recently curtailed love affair."Alice is in a coma for most of the book, and you learn about her and her family and life through her recollections and various conversations. Sometimes it's out of chronological order but it never feels confusing or irritating. I had a tear in my eye at the end of this book. What a fantastic debut novel t...

Maggie O'Farrel is a great discovery - thanks Khay - this book was similar to Esme (which was both impressive and unimpressive - on the one hand, it's amazing to see how someone can be so crafty at developing multiple narratives and plot lines, but then when it happens twice you kind of feel like even something unique can be a formula) in that, without paining the reader (ie, Time Travlers Wife), the author delivers a story that is both captivating and mysterious, the pieces coming to light slow...

I could probably read O’Farrell’s grocery list and be mesmerized—I just can’t keep my eyes off her words. They make me relaxed and excited at the same time. This is the fourth book I’m read of hers in the past couple of months, which says something, because I like to sit down with a variety of writers. Once in a blue moon, I’ll read two books by the same author in a year, but no more. In her other books, O’Farrell makes these gigantic, run-on lists telling us what’s happening. I just love that s...

In praise of this novel and writer, Colum McCann wrote: ”A psychological meditation on the issues of family and love . . . written in crisp, clear, unadorned prose. Maggie O’Farrell is certainly a voice to look out for.” Prophetic words indeed, as we all now know. This was Maggie O’Farrell’s first novel, published in 2000. In the Author’s Notes at the end she describes how this book started with a couple of paragraphs, and was written piecemeal over a period of a few years while holding down

NOT A REVIEW OF AFTER YOU'D GONE, WHICH WAS OKAY BUT WENT IN ONE EAR AND OUT THE OTHERI realise goodreads is for books but I found a piece of beautiful writing about the vain search for modern romance in a movie called Kissing Jessica Stein. The first part of this movie is all about a thirty-ish woman in New York who can't meet the right guy, fairly usual but quite funny too. Then it takes off in a different direction, which I'll refrain from commenting on or you'll raise your eyebrows, I know y...

This book wrecked me. It follows a woman named Alice who’s in a coma after stepping into traffic, and her family doesn’t know whether or not it was a suicide attempt. The narrative jumps around to all different periods of her life, focusing on her relationship with her lover, John – a relationship that we learn has ended, but we don’t know why. We also get snippets of her mother and grandmother’s lives.The writing overall wasn’t my favorite. Mostly I thought there were too many adjectives (she n...

I didn't really have time to read this book. So I gobbled it up in two days! Isn't that the power of any great book - that reading becomes compulsive as you find yourself sucked into the story regardless of time constraints? It's testament to Maggie O'Farrell's skill as a writer. She cast a line and reeled me in during the opening paragraph. No hint of a dull start or laborious scene setting. The ride begins on line one. When I'd finished it last night, I glanced at the rating on Amazon, out of

In form this is similar to O’Farrell’s The Distance Between Us, one of my Reading Ireland selections from last year: short sections of a few pages flit between times and perspectives. (There’s also an impulsive trip from London to Scotland in both.) But whereas in her third novel I found the jump cuts confusing and unnecessary, here they just work, and elegantly, to build a portrait of Alice Raikes, in a coma after what may have been a suicide attempt. That day she’d taken a train from London to...

I made a huge mistake in choosing to read AFTER YOU'D GONE, by Maggie O'Farrell. I'm not a fan of family dramas and here we have not one, not two, but three generations of familial bickering. I was initially intrigued by the book description where Alice, the youngest of the generations, "witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately." I wanted to know what she saw. Unfortunately, we don't know what she saw even when she sees it. I read 165 pages before I gav...

I almost gave up on this one. The first third of the book meanders so much, the effect is more irritation than confusion. The various scenes from Alice's childhood were unnecessary, as were the asides about how her parents met, her grandmother's boarding-school years, etc. The alternating points of view and shifts in time also created a jarring, schizophrenic narrative that reads like a series of vignettes vs. a unified narrative.The book was redeemed only by the central plot point, which hinges...

4★“Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen? I saw something. Something awful.”I didn’t realise this was Maggie O’Farrell’s debut until after I’d read it. I’ve enjoyed other books of hers and always wanted to read more. Her female characters are complex and flawed and believable. I don’t remember any of the men, but perhaps that’s just me.Alice is in a coma after being hit by a car, with her mother Ann and devoted dad, Ben, at her bedside. We see a