#1 New York Times bestselling author Johanna Lindsay presents
a powerfully romantic Regency-era tale that is breathtaking in scope
and wondrously passionate.
When Sebastian Townshend, son of the eighth Earl of Edgewood, was banished from his family due to the tragic results of a duel, he vowed never to return to England. Now living on the continent, Sebastian has forged a new identity as a deadly mercenary, The Raven. But his former neighbor, Lady Margaret Landor, has different plans for him. Back in England, Sebastian's father has had several accidents and Margaret suspects foul play and deception that reach as far back as the infamous duel. Convinced that only Sebastian can set the situation to rights, Margaret arranges a scandalous bargain with him that includes Sebastian's returning home as her husband. As the newlyweds uncover a deadly scheme, a fierce passion blossoms between them, which neither anticipated -- and neither can resist.
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After This: A Novel
List Price: $24.00
Our Price: $5.80
Your Save: $ 18.20 ( 76% )
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book written by: Alice McDermott
Average Customer Rating:   
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After This: A Novel - book description
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2006-09-05
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: 2006-09-05
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Reviews:
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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:
Summary: A mighty wind blows through it
Comment: I really enjoyed "Charming Billy" and looked forward to this novel, especially after all the glowing reviews in the press. But seriously, that wind started a'blowin' on page one and kept on for the next 80 pages or so. Blowing people and their lives randomly into the unknowable future. In case you didn't get the meaning of the wind, its spelled out on the back cover. The wind finally lets up and turns to rain -right when people start crying (raindrops =tear drops, get it? Ms. McDermott even explains it for you in case you missed it). Somehow what seemed like a promising novel turned into an Iowa Writers Workshop assignment.
Yes, the woman can write but I don't know what happened here. This is really a sub par effort. Maybe charting two generations of an Irish Catholic family on Long Island from the post WW II era through the turbulent 60s and 70s in 280 pages was overly ambitious. The first 100 pages I found relatively uninteresting but I persevered based on her reputation. The middle section was the best but once I realized that she was just going to finish out the novel with set pieces about each child (with their eventual future telescoped parenthetically), my interest waned and disappointment set in. As other reviewers have noted, this really isn't a novel. Its also not a bad effort. More like something from Oprahs book club that will be made into a movie for the Oxygen network. The real problem is the abundance of good writers competing for readers' diminishing free time. After This, Ms. McDermott just dropped down on my priority list.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Exquisite writing
Comment: This book is a bit like a gorgeous still-life painting. Things happen, but mostly the story doesn't seem to be the important part of the story. The writing is the real joy in this book, the images, the word choice, the delicate, perfect grace that is each sentence. That's what shines for me here. It is sometimes hard to slow down enough to really enjoy this book. It requires a kind of patience and attention to detail that is not common or easy to maintain in modern life. Reading this for me has been a little bit like eating my vegetables. And I love vegetables. It's just hard sometimes to make that initial effort and choice with all the other junk around.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for me...
Comment: This is the most beautifully written boring book that I have ever read/listended to. The author has a gift for creating evocative scenes and characters, however, I did not care for the episodic threads that tangled through without beginning or end. I had to force myself to finish it. I kept thinking it would be better by the end. It wasn't - at least for me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not so thrilled After reading This
Comment: I was interested in this book mainly because it takes place on Long Island, where I live and grew up. I have to say that I was very disappointed with this book. I felt like it jumped around way too mucha nd never fully explained important events. I found myself re-reading pages to make sure that I was not missing anything. The plot seemed to be something that I would like, but I felt as thougg too many things were being fit in to not enough pages.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Yet Another Fine Novel
Comment: This is another great novel by Alice McDermott -- she is one of those writers for whom my central wish (and given the quality of her work, an irrational and unreasonable wish)is that we did not have to wait years for their next work.
Yet this novel appears to me to mark a major development in McDermott's work. For it is here that she has introduced a trope, the wind, as a unifying metaphor, not just to emphasize the notion of moments of major change -- the meeting of the husband and wife, the blackout, and even the son's departure to Vietnam is marked by the wind swirling in the alley by the school, but also to tie these events, and these lives together. The wind is in fact with us from the very first sentence: "Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks-the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes." I cannot recall such an extensive use such devices in her earlier work. This device is introduced with the utmost skill, artfully unobtrusively. Thus, the reader not only gets the benefit of McDermott's unsentimental yet somehow highly sympathetic descriptions of these "average" lives, a hallmark of her work, but also her development in storytelling.
Moreover, here she uses Joyce-like language (aliteration in sentences describing snow - a tribute to Joyce's The Dead?) of the sort that I don't recall from her previous work.
A wonderful novel.
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