Afterwards

Rachel Seiffert

Editions

Review

Seiffert has followed the success of her first novel with a book that marks her as a truly interesting writer.  'The Dark Room' (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize) was set during the Second World War but in her new novel she has taken on a contemporary situation that explores how much you need to know someone in order to love them, and whether knowing that some secret is withheld makes love impossible.  Alice and Joseph are Londoners who start a relationship, but she is troubled by the sense of something undisclosed dating from his time as a soldier in Northern Ireland.  Meanwhile she considers the relationship her taciturn, widowed father had with her mother: it appears that something occurred when he served as a pilot during the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya which either was, or was not, understood by her mother.  There is no glamour to the setting, which enables Seiffert to concentrate on the possibilities of intimacy without distraction, and with honesty.  Highly ambitious in its apparent simplicity, this is an absorbing and skilful novel. - review by Johnny de Falbe