Afterwards

Despite the halting, low-key narration as Joe and Alice attempt to piece together the terms of their engagement, a simmering tension builds, though Seiffert is admirably less concerned with the revelation of atrocities than in how the soldier, having breached the first commandment, negotiates a return to ordinary life

Observer

Readers who wonder why... Martin Amis and... Kiran Desai seem to flinch from writing about their own times should study Ms Seiffert

Economist

Rachel Seiffert is the poet and spokeswoman of those who find themselves on the wrong side of history...powerful, almost unbearably intense and wonderfully written

The Times

A quietly ambitious book

Guardian

Superb...the drama is balanced and the tension sustained...masterful

Financial Times

Masterful, delightfully controlled prose...This highly engaging novel continues to reveal itself long after it is read

Sunday Telegraph

Carefully unsentimental...remarkable...we are given the complicated substance of unadorned lives

Sunday Times

Compelling... A daring work, sure to gain her greater recognition..the portrait of the ex-soldier Joseph is as fine a depiction of a man in crisis as you will read

Daily Telegraph

A remarkable feat... precise and searing... One of the most intelligent and ethical writers of her generation

Literary Review

Elegant... Authentic... One of the significant accomplishments of Afterwards is a coiling suspense driven more by psychology than circumstance

New York Times

[Afterwards] is about invisible borders, the hard-held Irish border, the border between lovers, between generations, between past and present. It is a fine and profound work

Irish Times

Seiffert returns to many of the themes of her first novel, The Dark Room: guilt, grief, memory and forgetting. But Afterwards also asks the questions about how much people can really know about the people they love

Independent