After You - A Novel

Zusatztext “I sat down to start Julie Buxbaum's glorious second novel! After You ! and could not get up until I was finished .  After You is a surprising! funny! and deeply moving novel about how we learn to take care of the people who matter most to us—and! if we are lucky! learn to care for ourselves in the process.  With Buxbaum's signature wit and warmth! After You is the perfect companion to The Opposite of Love .  Read it.  Just make sure you have nowhere to be that day...”—Laura Dave! author of The Divorce Party “Pitch-perfect from the very first page! After You is a tender! gripping story of how far we sometimes need to wander in order to find our way back home. A must-read for anyone who has ever wondered how to jump start her life! and really! isn’t that all of us?” — Allison Winn Scotch! author of Time of My Life “Buxbaum writes with honesty and grace about the things we know about our friends and the things we wish we didn't.   After You highlights—beautifully and compellingly—the truth that sometimes we have to lose the people closest to us to find ourselves."—Jodi Picoult! author of Handle with Care and My Sister’s Keeper Informationen zum Autor Julie Buxbaum is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School. The author of The Opposite of Love , she currently lives in London. Klappentext When tragedy strikes across the ocean, Ellie Lerner drops everything-her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston suburbs-to travel to London and pick up the pieces of her best friend Lucy's life. While Lucy's husband, Greg, retreats into himself, his and Lucy's eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, has simply stopped speaking. Desperate to help Sophie, Ellie turns to a book that gave her comfort as a child, The Secret Garden. As its story of hurt, magic, and healing blooms around them, so, too, do Lucy's secrets-some big, some small. Peeling back the layers of her friend's life, Ellie is forced to confront her own as well: the marriage she left behind, the loss she'd hoped to escape. And suddenly Ellie's carefully constructed existence is spinning out of control in a chain of events that will transform her life-and the lives of those around her-forever. Chapter One Let’s pretend that things are different. That in the last couple of days, I haven’t become the kind of person who resorts to wishing on eyelashes, first stars of the night, and the ridiculous 11:11, both a.m. and p.m., in earnest and with my eyes closed. That Lucy and her family haven’t transformed into tabloid stars with a full picture on the cover of the Daily Mail with the headline Notting Hill Murdergate!, and the lead story on the BBC evening news. Let’s pretend that I am home, on the right side of the Atlantic, the one where I understand the English language, and that tomorrow will be just like early last week, or the week before that one, when the days were indistinguishable. That it’s not necessary to resort to memories—to a time before—when I think of Lucy. How about this: Let’s just pretend that Lucy is not dead. That she will not continue to be dead now, even though that’s what that means—dead. “Want some more?” I ask Sophie, Lucy’s eight-year-old daughter, but she seems uninterested in the elaborate bowl of ice cream I’ve doused with concentric circles of whipped cream. She sits with her knees drawn to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. An upright fetal position, a pose that has been as reflexive for her as irrational wishing and pretending has been for me. Striped pastel pajamas ring her legs—pink, blue, yellow stripes—and on top, she wears a long-sleeved T-shirt with a decal of a purple horse with a silver mane. Her socks have abrasive soles that scratch and swish along the kitchen tiles, a sound I haven’t heard since my own childhood and that I assoc...

Product details

• Authors: Julie Buxbaum
• Publisher: Dial Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.06.2010
• EAN: 9780385341257
• ISBN: 978-0-385-34125-7
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 20 mm
• Series: Random House Reader's Circle
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature