**Longlisted for the Baileys Prize**

After Before is an intimate and beautiful novel about three women whose lives interweave: Emily - a Rwandan Genocide survivor, Lynn - a terminally ill woman in her early 60s and Vera - a young woman struggling to come to terms with her troubled past.

Spanning cultures and ages, the novel explores the universality of guilt, regret, and grief. This year is the 20th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, and the novel gives a moving insight into the personal atrocities experienced at the time. Jemma researched the book through first hand interviews with a Rwandan Genocide survivor and reading War Crime documents.

Blurb

“That was the day that Mama made the rules: If they come, run. Be quiet and run. But not together. Never together. If one is found, at least the other survives….”

During a cold, British winter, three women reach crisis point. Emily, an immigrant survivor of the Rwandan genocide is existing but not living. Vera, a newly Christian Londoner is striving to live a moral life, her happiness constantly undermined by secrets from her past. Lynn, battling with an untimely disease, is consumed by bitterness and resentment of what she hasn’t achieved and what has been snatched from her.

Each suffering their own demons, their lives have been torn open by betrayal: by other people, by themselves, by life itself. But as their paths interweave, they begin to unravel their beleaguered pasts, and inadvertently change each other’s futures.