Afterwards

May 21, 2007
Britain's ongoing involvement in Northern Ireland threatens the budding romance between Londoners Alice, a physical therapist, and Joseph, a decorator and house painter, in Seiffert's psychologically acute, relentlessly grim second novel (following the Booker shortlisted The Dark Room
). Almost a decade has passed since Joseph, then a soldier, killed a suspected IRA terrorist at a military checkpoint. The incident haunts him, sometimes makes him violent and prevents him from forming serious attachments. Alice resents that Joseph is essentially shutting her out of his life. Her frustration is compounded by the birth father who's rejected her, and by the recent death of her maternal grandmother. Alice tenuously cares for her grandfather, David, whose emotional remoteness may be linked to his stint with the RAF in 1950s Kenya. When Joseph good-naturedly offers to do some free decorating at David's house, an easy rapport develops between the two reticent men, until things go wrong. Although the characters' politics are simplistic, Seiffert masterfully chronicles the trajectory, and the causes, of Alice and Joseph's damaged relationship. Her beautifully understated, pointed exploration of the emotional toll of guerrilla war shines with clarity and vision.

June 15, 2007
Seiffert's enigmatic new work opens with two terse memories, swiftly recounted and just as swiftly left behind until the reader finally discovers how they fit into the story. Raised by a single mother in her grandparents' home in England, Alice meets Joseph at a friend's birthday celebration, and they quickly become involved. Joseph even volunteers to do some construction work for David, Alice's crusty and taciturn grandfather, now widowed, who met and married his wife while doing army service in Kenya. As the reader slowly learns, Joseph himself has served in Northern Ireland, and he remains resolutely haunted by events that took place there. But Alice isn't privy to these secrets, and Joseph's reluctance to unfurl his past drives them apart, even as David seems ready to unburden himself of his own sorry tale. The award-winning Seiffert ("The Dark Room") allows this story to unfold in brief, bright, elliptical stabs of narrative that effectively drive the story forward. At first, one chafes for events to bound ahead and allow the veterans to pour out their secrets; eventually, it's refreshing to discover that Seiffert doesn't fall for easy catharsis, reminding us that sometimes sorrow can never be resolved. For all literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 3/15/07.]Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2007
The hidden consequencesof bloodshed have been London-basedSeifferts focus since her prizewinning debut, The Dark Room (2001). In her third exquisitely choreographed book, this fluently psychological writer portrays a sensitive nurse contending with two men of different generations deeply scarred by their military service. The daughter of a single mother who has never met her father, Alice is grieving for her recently deceased grandmother when she meets Joseph, a plasterer. Much as sheenjoys his company, she is leery of his fierce privacy, which echoes her grandfathers frustrating silence about his time in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. Seiffert, adept at conveying the significance of the simplest of daily routines, writes with equal conviction from both Alices and Josephs points of view, so the reader is privy to Josephs suffering over a killing in Northern Ireland and Alices grandfathers haunting confessions to the younger man. Each scene of tenderness, conflict, or surrenderis a marvel of narrative delicacy as each character slowly traverses a minefield of emotions, seeking understanding of his and her own pain as well as the anguish of others. Seiffert has written an unusually beautiful, restrained, and trenchantnovel of the invisible yet lasting traumas ofwar.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)