Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton

A mother, her two children and a fire at their elite private school. It’s another stomach-churning premise from English writer Rosamund Lupton, following last year’s bestselling missing-person drama Sister.

Afterwards is a curious mélange, part quasi-ghost story, part family drama and part suspense thriller. It works – sort of.

When the fire breaks out, 17-year-old student nurse Jenny is in the highly flammable art classroom at the top of the building. Grace, attending the school sports day in which her son Adam is competing, sees the flames and rushes into the building in search of her daughter. Both are badly injured.

That the fire was caused by arson is established, as is – in Grace’s mind, at least – a short-list of suspects. (Momentarily we will come to how Grace can be acting as private detective when she is comatose in a hospital bed.)

One is Donald White, the husband of Grace’s friend Maisie and father of Jenny’s schoolmate Rowena, who suffered burns to her hands while attempting to rescue Jenny. Another is Annette Jenks, the dippy new secretary who is found to have been careless about her upkeep of the school’s comprehensive security protocols.

Then there is the woman Annette replaced, Elizabeth Fisher, recently forced into retirement. Finally, there is Silas Hyman, a disgruntled ex-staff member whose circumstances scream motive and who Lupton dangles in front of her reader like a carrot for much of the novel’s 470 pages.

Silas was fired from his teaching position over a playground incident in which a child suffered two broken legs. Though we are never encouraged to believe that he was guilty of the negligence of which he was accused (and Lupton comes up with an extraordinary child-sociopath for an alibi), his messy marriage and the suggestion of an entanglement with Jenny consume much of Grace’s attention – even as we know she should be looking elsewhere.

Afterwards is a book in which the darkest things happen. The backstory of Silas Hyman’s sacking is savage, the tale the principal spins to parents to explain the departure of the much-loved secretary is downright cruel, and the climax is designed to leave you feeling a little less safe in the world.

But whether you find Afterwards absorbing or irritating will largely depend on your ability and inclination to suspend disbelief, for the plot trick that allows Lupton’s two principals, Grace and Jenny, to exercise omniscience despite being unconscious and immobile in hospital beds is their evolution into living ghosts. They can roam the halls of the hospital, eavesdrop on conversations and even venture outside in the company of their loved ones, who are unaware of their sub-spectral presence.

They sit in on the interrogations conducted by Grace’s policewoman sister-in-law and spy on those Grace has pinpointed as suspects, meeting periodically to review their findings. It’s not dissimilar in spirit and mission to Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry and will seem preposterous to some, but Lupton’s empathy for her characters and engrossing narration of what becomes a search for justice is admirable.

2.5 / 5 stars: An engrossing mélange.

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My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

The rather lovely notion of enduring passion across many lifetimes is at the centre of My Name is Memory, the seventh novel by Ann Brashares, perhaps best-known as the author of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series for young adults. 

This new book is her second in the adult fiction genre, after 2007’s The Last Summer (of You and Me), and, clearly emboldened by her earlier successful renderings of the torment and complexity of teenagehood, she introduces her two main characters, Daniel and Lucy, as they experience a profound connection that comes to a climax at a high school ball.

The encounter, as fleeting as it is dramatic, leaves both Lucy and the reader baffled: who is Daniel and where did he come from? Why does he insist on calling Lucy ‘Sophia’? How can she be so drawn to someone she doesn’t even know?

Answers start to emerge in the following chapter, when the action jumps from present-day United States to North Africa in 541, and the tense from the third person to the first, with the narrator musing: “I was first born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch . . . I consider it my first life . . . I guess it’s possible that I’ve lived lives before that.”

This faltering voice belongs to Daniel, who has lived dozens of lives in succession and can remember them all. (The possibility that reincarnation is very common and that only the individual’s awareness of it is unusual is alluded to by Brashares but regrettably not fully explored.)

It is in this first life that he meets Lucy, then a nameless young girl who disappears inside a burning house that Daniel has torched in battle. Tormented, he searches for her down the centuries, finding her, in different women, in 700s Asia Minor and in England in the shadow of World War I. But how to engage Lucy’s memory of Daniel’s role in her previous lives, and what – or who – will intervene to thwart their love?

Aspects of My Name is Memory are reminiscent of Geraldine Brooks’ remarkable 2008 novel People of the Book, which tracked not a love affair but the journey of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, through centuries of European unrest.

Brashares’ tale, hinging as it does on character rather than setting, is neither as well-researched nor as meticulously detailed as Brooks’, but both writers have a knack for moving swiftly through time and from place to place without discombobulating the reader. Considering Brashares’ action can leap from 2006 Virginia to the coast of Crete in 899 in the course of two chapters, it’s an admirable feat.

That said, if you’ve had any more than a glancing encounter with Audrey Niffenegger’s megaselling The Time Traveller’s Wife, it will occur to you, within a handful of pages, that Brashares is either unabashedly ripping Niffenegger off or out to prove she can do it better.

For this and other reasons – the pure romanticism, the dastardly villain standing in the way of true love – Brashares’ storyline will be familiar in a favourite-blanket sort of way. It’s nothing out of the comfort zone, but good to spend some time with – and proves a surprisingly tender read that is best undertaken in a minimum of sittings. 

3 / 5 stars: The seven ages of man’s yearning.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.