After Before

Three women, beset by trauma, temptation, and regret, find each other in this “rich, haunted, gripping” novel (Ruth Padel, award-winning author of Beethoven Variations). 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, each suffering her own demons, reach a 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. 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. Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction