After This - Tapa blanda

'Sublime ... McDermott's simple prose is full of poetic distillations that capture a mood or a moment just so, and it all comes together in a radiant portrait of family life' Daily Mail 'McDermott has laid bare the nerve centre of a family, and located an enduring grace in the constraints and confusion of day-to-day life' Times Literary Supplement 'A beautifully etched portrait of how generations are never as sure as they seem about their interpretation of the world around them. Wonderful reading' Good Housekeeping 'The triumph of Alice McDermott's After This is its evocation of childhood ... Written with a remarkable attentiveness ... McDermott's unshowy, succinct sentences summon up the flavour of the past when it was new' Sunday Times

Alice McDermott's masterful novel is a portrait of a working-class American family living through the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth century. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter fruits of the sexual revolution, their older brother, Jacob, finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Clare, the youngest child, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. As their parents, John and Mary, struggle to uphold the family's framework, the four siblings are destined to experience the challenges and liberties of the 1960s. With McDermott's inimitable understanding and grace, "After This" captures the joy, sorrow, anger and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.