Convoluted structure that came together into a moving portrait of grief and family secrets.

Oh, this hurt. I've heard about O'Farrell's debut over the years and decided finally to try it. The structure initially felt disorientating, throwing the reader around various times in the last 50 or more years within the lives of the women in one family.

But in my mind this soon settled as I worked out who was who, and the jumps back and forward no longer seemed to matter really.

Without giving any plot points away, this was really quite beautifully written conveying the pain and joy of love, the utter despair of grief, the long-standing hurt and hidden emotions of secrets, and the implications when exposed. What was shown to us at the start is only actually 'revealed' to us much later, and O'Farrell slowly and quietly allows us to fall for her characters before dropping the bomb of sudden change and life turns on us as well as her women.

The title itself even has multiple significances when you look back at all you've read. The themes running through it only become apparent once you've finished and see all the threads in their entireties.

I cried a few times at some of the descriptions of Alice and what she's going through. I was horrified at times by the same.

It's one you could re-read almost straight after finishing to delve more into what you missed.

Unbelievably assured debut. I'm sorry I didn't read it sooner in my life.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing me with a sample reading copy of this newest edition.

The writing in this book is great and Maggie O'Farrell is clearly gifted in her ability to write. However, this feels like she finished the book, tore all the different paragraphs into separate pieces of paper and threw them in the air before publishing it in the order they landed. Alice, the central character, is in Edinburgh visiting her sisters then she's with her father who builds her a tree swing. Then her boyfriend John and then a boyfriend Mario at Uni. Then in a coma.... There is no clue as to what time of Alice's life we are in and the pieces of the story jump from one to another with simply a paragraph break, no subheading, no chapters, no timescale clues.

Some bits are just bizarre and I have no clue who the person it relates to is. And then there is a funeral where the coffin slides back behind the curtain at the crematorium and minutes later the next of kin is handed an urn with the deceased's ashes name on. This is crazy - cremation takes hours and the ashes would not be released for many days after.

To help future readers here is the approximate family tree which might help you - I had to write it down as I tried to make sense of the actual story. Elspeth is the matriarch of the family. Her parents went to India as missionaries when she was 7 and left her at an English boarding school. Elspeth eventually married Gordon. He also went abroad to be a missionary and died young of malaria. Elspeth was left with a big house in Berwick. Her son, Ben, married Ann and they lived with Elspeth in the big house. Ann and Ben had Kirsty, Alice and Beth. Alice was always different to the others. Kirsty married Neil and has Annie and Jamie who are very young in the story. Kirsty and Beth live in Edinburgh whereas Alice is mostly in London. The main story is that of Alice who has a boyfriend Mario at Uni and John who becomes the love of her life. John is Jewish, Alice isn't.

Hopefully that will give reader enough info to make more sense of the story than I did at first. The story would be great if only told in a clearer way but this is the most frustrating book I've read since reading two recently without quotation marks. Note to self, don't just check for quotations marks in future but also for clear indications between timescales. This is my first Maggie O'Farrell book and might be my last unless I am reliably informed that she only used this timescale 'random paragraphs' gimmick in this debut novel and wrote her more well known novels in a more understandable manner.

DNF at 55%
This book is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are a bunch of random scenes thrown into a pile, and it's the reader's duty to pick them up, sort, and make sense of them. Sorry, but no. It's too much. Alice is in London, on a train, in Scotland, with her boyfriend, with her sisters, with her husband, in a coma, and with her boyfriend. It goes on and on. What's more, sometimes the narrative is in the first, sometimes in the third person and this can change on one page unexpectedly. This book is impossible to follow.
I like the writing style and I think there's a good story well told, but the construction is ridiculous. This could be a 4 star read.

I thought I had read all Maggie O’Farrell’s novels and had thoroughly enjoyed them all so I was very surprised to discover that I had missed out on reading her very first novel - After You’d Gone.
Unlike her other novels this one switches back and forwards in time. At first I found this confusing and did in fact wonder whether it would spoil my enjoyment of the book. However I quickly adjusted to it as the pieces of the story fell into place. O’Farrell’s use of switching the narrative from first person to third person only enhances the story telling further.
The opening of the book where Alice arrives by train in Edinburgh and then instantly returns to London immediately makes the reader want to know why? What did she see? And this set the tone for the rest of the book for me. It was compulsive reading as new story twists were revealed.
The story is full of emotion and you would have to have a heart of stone not to be affected by the intense love between Alice and John caught up in the tangles and intrigue of their families.
My thanks to NetGalley – if it had not supplied me with a free copy of this new 25th anniversary edition in return for a review I would have missed out on reading this wonderful novel.

This is such an amazing story written in a unique way which totally has you absorbed and feeling as though you know the characters and their families so amazingly well.

Alice is the more wild child in her family, she looks different to her sisters, she's headstrong and the relationship between her and her mother is clear from the start... but also what is clear is that Alice is now in a coma. The story then weaves back and forth around different time points in Alice's life which builds up a picture of who she is and leaves us wondering which of the events will it be that leads her to be in this coma... and... will she wake from it?

The way the story weaves between different events really shouldn't work... yet it does! Only a very clever author can master this, and it's done impeccably well. I absolutely loved it. It was tender, raw and just full of love of the complexities of it.

One of my favourite reads of the year so far. Fantastic.

While the start of this novel is very dramatic (a young woman catches a train from London to Edinburgh and then immediately on arrival turns back after seeing something so distressing that it leads her to potentially taking her own life), the pace slows down just as dramatically so that it took me a while to get into it. I found the constant shifts in perspectives and timelines a bit too much at the start, though it was worth persevering as the storytelling and character-building is otherwise brilliant. Given all the flashbacks and narrative shifts, I think I would have enjoyed the novel more if I’d had the chance to read it in fewer sittings (not a book to dip in and out of!). It is however beautifully written and very moving.

As soon as you meet Alice, you understand that her mental health is in a poor way. This is further exacerbated when she impulsively gets on a train from London to Edinburgh to meet her sisters, only to see something so traumatic in the station toilets that she immediately gets back on a train to London. She teeters on the edge of a pavement trying to decide whether or not to walk into London traffic on her way back home.

Whether deliberate or accidental the next we know she is in a coma in hospital. The rest of the book goes backwards and forwards through her life, building up to the revelation of why she was already distressed and what pushed her towards the edge in Waverley station toilets.

This novel is unlike anything else I have read. It is written almost as a stream of consciousness, with the narrative jumping backwards and forwards in timelines - not for the easily confused. It paints a vivid picture of the highs and lows of Alice's life, of the joys, the grief, the difficult choices that many people have to make in their lives. Did I enjoy it? I'm not sure. It is so emotional, it's almost exhausting. But am I glad I read it? Yes, absolutely. It is beautifully written, with evocative and powerful language used throughout.

This is one of Maggie O'Farrell's novels that have slipped under my radar for years. How did that happen? This was a superb exploration of love, loss and grief, and also a stunningly brilliant character portrayal of three generations of women. Elspeth, Ann and Alice are grandmother, mother and daughter, and their stories are told in a very interwoven way as the narrative explores the story of how Alice cannot come to terms with the loss of the love of her life, John.
As the story of their meeting and what happened to part them unfolds, we also meet Alice as a feisty young girl, a headstrong adolescent and a young student on the cusp of life, adored by Elspeth and despaired of by Ann (who has a huge secret of her own).
What I took away from this novel was that love in all its forms - maternal, familial and romantic, is messy, complicated and oh-so-powerful. If we didn't love, we couldnt grieve, but we would miss out on so much that is important in life.
Maggie O'Farrell is a wonderful writer, drawing the reader into her characters' lives as they blossom beneath her pen. Not a word is wasted. The shortest sentence conveys so much emotion - and though the constant switching of viewpoints is confusing at first, it works really well in showing just how much the lives of the three women are entangled, and, in many ways, echo each other.
My emotions are wrung dry, but I'm so glad I ve read this book I'd give this more than five stars if I could.

This is my second time reading ‘After you’d gone’ - and I absolutely adored every page, as much as the first time I read it ... I love it even more so than the Vanishing Act of Annie Lennox, which I thought was superb. The characters will stay with me for some time, along with a little tear in my eye.

Thank you to Net Gallery for an ARC of the reprint of Maggie O’Farrell’s incredible debut.

'After You'd Gone' was Maggie O'Farrell's debut novel, written when she was in her 20s, which is being re-released this March. This is a story which, though fictional, feels very much taken from real life - it is unsentimental and grounded in everyday details, to the extent that it sometimes feels partly social history. The structure dots around in time and between characters, with a young woman Alice as the main focus.

'After You'd Gone' reminded me a bit of reading Margaret Atwood's first novel 'The Edible Woman' - it's interesting to see how a writer of that stature started out, their raw talent, but at the same time it's not in the same league as the later masterpieces which got you hooked. In this case, there is an emotional fearlessness and honesty to the writing which is recognisable from O'Farrell's wonderful 'Hamnet'. Unfortunately, though, this book just wasn't my cup of tea - I really wanted to like it, but as it progressed, I didn't care enough about the characters to feel gripped by the story. This is definitely an outlier opinion, given the number of 5 star reviews on NetGalley.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

I read this originally when it first came out and was blown away by it then, so I jumped at the chance to re-read it and although I didn't remember many of the details I just remembered the big event where Alice sees something through a mirror. It didn't disappoint this time around and I was glad. The different perspectives and different timelines is a well worn structure now in many books, but here it is part of the narrative and essential that we see it all as a piece, because otherwise it wouldn't shock us or surprise us when we find out the mystery that Alice sees. O'Farrell is good at characters and these, even the minor characters are really lively and life-like, even the fairly dull minor characters come alive. It's a good one to re-release and it hasn't dated at all I don't think. Superb.

An absolutely mesmerising novel. Do not be put off by the swerves in narrative viewpoint - I was a bit thrown at first - because you quickly get used to it. In fact, the reason (the narrative reason, that is) for the flickers of point of view become clear as you read. What you have is an epic novel that spans generations of relationships that lead to the protagonist, Alice. You *need* to know all of the innermost thoughts of her grandmother and her parents that lead to the most poignant and heart-wrenching storyline. Honestly, brilliant. Read it, and actually, literally, weep. My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the privilege of the ARC.

Having read all of Maggie O'Farrell's books - or so I thought - I soon realised I had never read her debut novel.
This is written partly as a mystery - Why did Alice try to kill herself.
What did Alice see at the railway station?
Why was Alice's childhood so wretched and different from her sisters?
Why did Alice struggle in her relationships until she met John?
The story of Alice shifts from one period in her life to another - seemingly in a random way - is she living her past in her coma?
I do not like love stories, but I love this book. I love the way it is written, the angst of Alice's life; her closeness to her grandmother, but the distance from her mother.
I loved this book.
Many thanks to Netgalley/Maggie O'Farrell/Headline for a digital copy of this title. All opinions expressed are my own.

A really good read. The story is beautifully written and focuses on the characters Alice and John and how they deal the obstacles put in their way and how Alice's mental health affects her and her family .It was nteresting learning the background of the characters and it flowed quite with plenty of plots and a secrets that will devastate Alice and leads to another tragedy in her life.,It was heartbreaking at times and a love story that will make you feel emotional and sad but also some happiness at the same time..

I'm amazed that this is an early novel by Maggie O'Farrell and one of the few I hadn't read. As ever, the writing is beautiful, nuanced and engaging with her characteristic intelligence when playing with time. She weaves elements of the backstory in tantalising glimpses with the present and creates an intriguing sense of half-understood threads which knit together in a satisfying whole by the end. A fascinating exploration of love, communication and grief. An absorbing, thought provoking read.

I absolutely loved this book. It's raw and honest, heart-breaking and powerful. Maggie O'Farrell is a wonderful storyteller and the writing is brilliant. The construction of the story is messy and confused, which absolutely reflects the protagonists viewpoint, but never done in a way that leaves the reader behind. There is a reason I will read everything this wonderful author writes, and this book is one of them.

Thank you Netgalley for an E-ARC. The power of love and grief make themselves known in vastly different ways within this, one, book.

I think the story got lost on the style of writing for me and I struggled to immerse myself in it fully.

She is such a great writer; I certainly could never fault Maggie Farrell on her skill with language. I came to this book after being captivated by Hamnet, but this novel did not really work for me. I think it was the structure, and this is a me-problem, in that I crave linear stories or at least to keep the flashbacks to a minimum. Here I felt as though I was dumped in the middle of a story I didn’t understand and left there for too long before things started making sense by which time I had tired of the effort.

But I can’t bring myself to give it only 2 stars when it’s not really a fault of the novel, but a fault of how I receive such narrative.

This was my first book by this author and loved it. Definitely more literary style but had enough drama in it to keep me entertained. Really well written and gripping highly recommend