Synopses & Reviews
After is a stunning debut about an intense erotic affair that takes place over one twenty-four hour period.
The woman is unnamed. The time is unspecified. The place is a motel somewhere in California. She is a widow, and it has been one year since her husband's death at the hands of Muslim extremists. She has decided, on the basis of a chance encounter, to take a Muslim lover. He is courtly, solicitous, understanding, and understandably nervous. He is married and has two daughters. She has had no lover since her husband's death.
Their graphically recounted affair is passionate and disturbing, and it veers into violence. How can desire so quickly transmogrify into hate? How does prejudice contaminate belief? Can grief ever be expunged? Can we purify ourselves of our pasts, redeem ourselves for the future, or are we consigned to a vicious cycle of recrimination and revenge?
A mesmerizing work of fiction that has the commercial appeal of Josephine Hart's Damage but which displays the cool control of Jim Crace and Michael Ondaatje, After is a riveting story of universal appeal, a timeless tale for the way we live now.
Review
Claire Tristram's After is as disturbing, challenging and subversive a debut novel as I have read in many years. Here's a very cunning, fearless writer, full of promise and surprise. Jim Crace
Review
"After is as disturbing, challenging, and subversive a debut novel as I have read in many years. Here's a very cunning, fearless writer, full of promise and surprise." --Jim Crace
"An intriguingly risky premise [and] an exploration of the ways in which lovers objectify one another, then turn tender in the most confusing circumstances...An appealing Mamet-like mystery." --The New York Times Book Review
"Somewhere, in another language, there exists a word to express the fog surrounding survivors. The word would have to convey the sense of damage and disbelief when, despite death, people continue to talk on the phone, eat, and drive their cars to work. Claire Tristram's new novel, After, inhabits the syllables of this word." --Village Voice Literary Supplement
"A balanced, taut narrative...truly chilling suspense." --Entertainment Weekly
"What emerges are questions of identity and what we think ourselves capable of. What we're left with is the notion that grief and hate can overtake us, no matter who we think we are." --USA Today
Synopsis
The thin line between love and hate is stretched to the limit in this mesmerizing fiction debut about an intense, erotic affair that veers into violence.
Synopsis
After is the story of an intense affair that takes place over a day and a night. It has been a year since the womans husband was murdered by Islamic extremists. Now she decides to take a lover, a Muslim man. Telling their story from both points of view, Claire Tristram describes their passion and their tenderness, their shifting desires and hesitations, and the unexpected escalation of their lovemaking into terrifying violence.
About the Author
Claire Tristram writes frequently about politics, culture, and science. She has written for
The New York Times, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, and
Salon. After is her first novel.