After Life
The tear-jerker masterpiece from the bestselling author of If I Stay
by
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Pub Date Jan 16 2025 | Archive Date Jan 06 2025
Allen & Unwin | Hot Key Books
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Description
A major new novel from bestselling author of If I Stay, Gayle Forman.
One spring afternoon after school, Amber arrives home on her bike. It's just another perfectly normal day. But when Amber's mom sees her, she screams. Because Amber died seven years ago, hit by a car while on the very same bicycle she's inexplicably riding now. This return doesn't only impact Amber. Her sister, Melissa, now seven years older, must be a new kind of sibling to Amber. Amber's estranged parents are battling over her. And the changes ripple farther and farther out: Amber's friends, boyfriend, and even people she met only once have been deeply affected by her life and death. In the midst of everyone's turmoil, Amber is struggling with herself. What kind of person was she? How and why was she given this second chance?
This magnificent tour de force by acclaimed author Gayle Forman brilliantly explores the porous veil between life and death, examines the impact that one person can have on the world, and celebrates life in all its beautiful complexity.
Advance Praise
"Gayle Forman has an uncanny ability to create characters in which we see ourselves, and her latest--which looks at where love goes, after a loss--is an honest, heartbreaking elegy to how memory makes relationships eternal." -- Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"After Life is a beautifully woven, extraordinary page-turner about a girl who has miraculously come back to life. But is it actually a miracle? I was consumed by this thought-provoking, deftly written, multilayered novel. Gayle Forman reigns as the queen of breaking hearts with a touch of magic." -- Adam Silvera, #1 New York Times bestselling author of They Both Die at the End
"I remember reading my first Gayle Forman book and how it felt like I was holding magic in my hands. After Life is no different. An immersive, impossible to put down story about love, loss, and most importantly, memory. A testament to the bond between sisters." —Rachael Lippincott, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Five Feet Apart
"After Life is a masterful tale about a family coping with loss, showing the way grief affects us in ways we don't even see, and in people we don't even know. Once I met Amber and her family, I didn't want to let them go." —Brigid Kemmerer, New York Times bestselling author of Carving Shadows Into Stone
"After Life proves once again that Gayle Forman is a master of both high concept and character. Full of grace and beauty, this book asks big questions about loss and grief, guilt and forgiveness, without ever straying from its true center: the unbreakable bond of sibling love. Forman weaves seemingly unconnected threads throughout the book, blurring the lines between fate and coincidence, until bringing it all together in a revelatory ending. I won't soon forget this one." —-David Arnold, New York Times bestselling author of Mosquitoland
"Forman is a master at making her readers fall in love — with a girl whose life is over, with a community of people in a small town who are barely surviving her loss, and with the incredible, surprising way everyone's stories knit together into a heartbreaking and hopeful whole." — E. Lockhart, author of We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781471418310 |
| PRICE | £8.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 272 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Pandora T, Reviewer
This book is not only compelling, but incredibly beautiful and heart felt.
As someone who lost someone close this year, this book hit close to home.
Gayle has a knack for writing about death and the afterlife in such a beautiful way, making you feel connected to the characters and invested in their stories. I loved how this book explored the various ways people deal with their grief, and how they might react should their loved one reappear. But also the way that so many people can be interconnected in ways they don't even know.
Julie O, Reviewer
The premise of this book drew me in, Long before I read the first page, being a novel by Gayle Forman, I knew it was going to be done tastefully.
We are thrown straight into Amber's life and instantly we are hit with the subject of death. What comes after? What happens to our families? Heavey questions at any point in our lives, but I think they are explored so expertly within these pages that you allow yourself some gentle exploration.
This character driven novel, is short, at 272 pages, and provoking. Each character shows a different reaction and belief on the idea of death, the afterlife and resurrection. Providing a point of relatability for every reader.
Towards the end of the novel we realise what is happening, how healing is different for each individual, how beliefs and having a support system aids that healing.
After Life is thought provoking, moving and a little confronting, loss of a loved one isn't an easy topic to write with authenticity and grace, but Gayle Forman has done that. Written in Formans way of making the pages flow easily, this fast paced ebb and flow of a read will leave you thinking long after you turn the final page.
Thankyou to NetGalley and Allen and Unwin for a review copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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