After You've Gone: A Novel

By Jeffrey Lent

Book Overview

In After You've Gone, a historical novel set in Nova Scotia, New York, and Amsterdam, Jeffrey Lent beautifully charts the sweep of a life and the discovery--and loss--of life-defining love. Henry Dorn has spent years building a family, but it only takes a single afternoon for it to fall apart. The woman with whom he fell in love in the first blush of youth, who has been his perfect mate through a lively young marriage ripened by the raising of three children, has been lost. The car wreck that killed her also took their son Robert, a veteran of the Great War whose bitterness and addiction to morphine had slowly been driving him and Henry apart. Restless, broken, questing but unsure for what, Henry buys a steamer ticket for Amsterdam, planning to research his family history and start life anew. But nothing could have prepared him for the young woman he meets on the ship: the fiery, self-sufficient Lydia Pearce, one of a new generation of women. At first Henry does not know what to make of Lydia but, before long, they have fallen into an affair of a depth and significance for which neither was prepared. And just as quickly as he was robbed of Olivia, Henry is faced with the gift of new possibilities--and the need to reconcile them with those already lost. From a hardscrabble Nova Scotia fishing town, to a women's college in New York, to a 1920s Europe alive with the unbuttoning of sexuality but scarred by war, After You've Gone is a gorgeous tale spanning several pivotal decades in American life, and an unforgettable portrait of one man and the extraordinary women he loved.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871138948
• ISBN13: 9780871138941
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

another excellent story by Jeffrey Lent

can't say enough about the books of this author. Have read all of them and have never been disappointed. He spins a good yarn that resounds in your mind long after completion. Wonderful depth of character.

Jeffrey Lent does it again

Someone once said that Cormac McCarthy could write instructions on how to operate a microwave and it would be a good read. I think the same thing can be said of Jeffrey Lent. Each of his novels have been so different that I think it is impossible to compare them, one to another. In this novel a man who has lead a fairly normal life with a successful career and grown children is faced with a sudden terrible accident and finds himself alone. Lent takes the reader back through parts of the characters childhood, his marriage, his failure to come to terms with his sons addiction, and sets him on a course of refinding himself. I thought the best phrase of the whole book was "how alone a person lives", this somehow makes the reader identify with that phrase. The ending while unexpected was, to me, the only way it could have ended, perhaps giving hope that there is grace in each decision we make along the way.

Lent does it again!!

Jeffrey Lent's new novel, AFTER YOU'VE GONE is not only a great love story it's also a indepth look at a man searching for a new start, a new life after being left in the wake of a diaster that rocks his very world. Lent's prose embraces the reader and his sense of place as he writes about different countries is just as pleasing as watching his characters sift through their lives for reason. Jeffrey Lent has done it again with this novel. He is one of the best American writers writing today and he deserves to be read. Buy this book, read it, charish it then read it again.