Alice McDermott, whose previous novels include the National Book
Award-winning CHARMING BILLY and the quietly luminous AT WEDDINGS
AND WAKES, has become known for finding the exceptional, the
extraordinary, in the daily events that make up family life. A
superior literary craftsperson, McDermott wastes nothing in her
spare, evocative prose, instead wresting emotion out of human
interactions and perfectly rendered images. AFTER THIS, McDermott's
domestic epic outlining several decades in the lives of a suburban
Irish Catholic family, will continue to cement her reputation as
one of the most accomplished American authors writing today.

AFTER THIS begins shortly after the close of World War II, as
30-year-old Mary Rose endures a lonely life, her days centered on
her work in the secretarial pool and the care she takes for her
father and brother. Every noon hour, Mary heads to the nearby
Catholic church where, now that the war is over, she prays for her
own life: "She did not want a life drained of kindness and
compassion and humor.... She had prayed for if not a better life
than this daily, lonely one, a better way to be content with it."
Before we're 10 pages into the book, Mary meets handsome John Keane
at the lunch counter, and the rest of the novel centers on the ways
this utterly average couple finds contentment in the dramas that
play out over the several decades of their married life.

Mary and John have four children, each of whom takes center stage
for at least a moment in the novel's shifting third-person
narration. The result is a portrait of a family's change over time,
an impressionistic portrait at best, since although the overall
thrust of the narrative is chronological, McDermott slyly shows us
glimpses of the future --- or the past --- through asides to the
reader that hint at her characters' fates.

Events from the past (John's chance meeting during WWII with a
doomed young man named Jacob) parallel those in the present (John
and Mary's own frail, sensitive son, named for that dead soldier,
heads off to fight his own battles in Vietnam). Likewise, events in
the present (the family huddled together in the basement to wait
out a hurricane) gain importance when placed in the context of the
past (children huddled in corners of bomb shelters during the Blitz
in London). Advice given, offhand comments, even the music of an
unseen pianist all echo through the pages of the novel and weave
together events in a way that conveys the profoundness and
mysteries inherent in every family's story.

John and Mary Keane's youngest daughter, Clare, is born in the wake
of that hurricane and will eventually shape the family's story in
her own way. Their neighbor, who ends up delivering the baby,
thinks to himself, "there were children growing in nearly every
house in this neighborhood, in every borough and every town.
Thousands more were being born today, being conceived --- women
with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs. Keane herself
already had three. If one of these, if a hundred of them, a
thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete
somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason's taut string already
snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God's
bustling."

In AFTER THIS, McDermott challenges this supposition, showing ---
in minute details, in moments of real tragedy and quiet grace ---
how genuinely extraordinary are the lives of even the most ordinary
families.