After You've Gone: A Novel - Softcover

Lent, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802144551 ISBN 13: 9780802144553

Publisher: Grove Press, 2009

Synopsis

After You’ve Gone in paperback, it is a moving, sublime love story set in the cataclysmic decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Henry Dorn has spent years building a family, but it only takes a single afternoon for it to fall apart. Abruptly widowed of the love of his life, Henry buys a steamer ticket for Amsterdam, the city of his heritage, hoping to start life anew. But nothing could have prepared him for the woman he meets on the ship: the fiery, self-sufficient Lydia Pearce, one of a new generation of women. Before long the two have fallen into an affair of a depth and significance for which neither was prepared. But the memory of his wife and the vexed relationship he had with their son haunt Henry in the midst of his new beginning. Jeffrey Lent is one of our finest novelists, and After You’ve Gone delivers a tale that beautifully charts the sweep of a life, the grim reach of a war, and the discovery and loss of life-defining love

About this title

From the Publisher:

Jeffrey Lent's three novels have placed him in the forefront of contemporary American fiction, earning him comparisons to Kent Haruf, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Proulx. Now he delivers After You've Gone, a historical novel set in Nova Scotia, New York, and Amsterdam, which 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.

About the Author:

Jeffrey Lent is the author of In the Fall and Lost Nation, which have been translated into more than eight languages. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and two daughters.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0802144551
• ISBN 13: 9780802144553
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256