What we thought:
The book opens on Alice deciding to commit suicide. She moves dream-like, travels to Scotland, sees something when in the station toilets, returns to King’s Cross, gets run over by a car and is taken to hospital in a coma.
As her levels of consciousness alter, Alice listens to the conversations of her family around her. We are taken backwards in time, and forward again to different times in her life, to make sense of why she was contemplating suicide, and the complexity of the family’s background.
Beautifully written and full of emotion, very moving. The language hits just the right note, and we can share Alice’s pain. Most of us enjoyed this one.
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Synopsis/Review:
‘A distraught young woman boards a train at King's Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London. After You'd Gone follows Alice's mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story which is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at the family's heart.’ (Amazon) |
