Ellie Lerner is a typical thirty-something woman trying
to find the balance between the demands of a busy career
and her personal life in the quiet suburbs of Boston,
Massachusetts. Luckily for her, she has her best friend
Lucy to lend her support. Too bad she happens to live on
the other side of the Big Pond. Yet despite their distance,
these two childhood friends manage to remain close at
heart. There is no problem big or small that would ever
keep them apart.
While walking her daughter to school one fall day,
Lucy is brutally murdered. Without giving it a second
thought, Ellie rushes to England to console Greg, Lucy's
grieving husband, and her eight-year-old daughter Sophie.
In the blink of an eye, Lucy's perfect family is shattered
into pieces leaving her dearest friend Ellie the burden of
trying to make it whole again.
In hopes of helping both Greg and Sophie come to
terms with Lucy's death, Ellie selflessly takes on the role
of surrogate mother and friend. As the days turn into
weeks, Ellie finds herself becoming more attached to Sophie
than she ever had expected. Realizing she can't bring
herself to return to the States, she informs her husband
that she's not coming home.
As the three mourners struggle to move past their
grief, they soon realize that Lucy, the mother, wife, and
friend they thought they knew, kept secrets locked safely
away in her heart. Making the choice to move on and accept
Lucy for who she was is a mountain these three wounded
souls fear to climb.
AFTER YOU is a powerful novel expertly written with
elements of deception, denial, and most importantly
redemption that challenge the reader to question how well
we really know the ones we love. Buxbaum's innate ability
to reach out to the reader and make such an emotional
connection makes AFTER YOU this fall's must-read
selection.
Julie
Buxbaum, the acclaimed author of The Opposite of Love,
delivers a haunting, gloriously written novel about love,
family, and the secrets we hide from each other—and
ourselves.
It happened on a tree-lined street in Notting
Hill to a woman who seemed to have the perfect life. Ellie
Lerner’s best friend, Lucy, was murdered in front of her
young daughter. And, as best friends do, Ellie dropped
everything—her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston
suburbs—to travel to London and pick up the pieces of
Lucy’s life. While Lucy’s husband, Greg, copes with his
grief by retreating into himself, eight-year-old 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 the two spend hours exploring the
novel’s winding passageways, its story of hurt, magic, and
healing blooms around them. But so, too, do Lucy’s secrets—
some big, some small—secrets Lucy kept hidden, even from
her best friend. Over a summer in London, as Ellie peels
back the layers of her friend’s life, she’s 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
those around her—forever.
A novel that will resonate in
the heart of anyone who’s had a best friend, a love lost,
or a past full of regrets, After You proves once
again the
unique and compelling talent of Julie Buxbaum.
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