Praise for Maggie O’Farrell’s
After You’d Gone

Lesley Glaister, Independent ‘Love in its many guises – romantic, familial, unwilling, redemptive – powers the novel… it’s passionate, tender, and portrayed with a refreshing lack of cynicism… a compulsively readable and accomplished first novel’ 

Erica Wagner, The Times ‘Riveting… O’Farrell has a gift for storytelling that makes the reader long for her next effort’ 

Shena Mackay, Daily Telegraph ‘Such an accomplished performance’

Esther Freud, Guardian Books of the Year ‘Maggie O’Farrell’s first novel, After You’d Gone, had me so gripped I had to feign illness in order to devote myself to it entirely’

Independent Books of the Year ‘Unputdownable, beautifully written… A sharp, fresh talent to watch’

Guardian Books of the Year ‘Beautifully constructed… unashamedly passionate’

Mail on Sunday ‘This tense, involving and disturbing read… kept me up half the night, unable to put it down’

Time Out ‘O’Farrell is blessed with a tender, solicitous intelligence… honest, moving and wise beyond its author’s years’

Independent on Sunday ‘Harrowing, profound, and beautifully written’

Mail on Sunday ‘Grips the reader from its first dramatic pages… What begins as a thriller grows and deepens into a powerful expose of the ghosts that lie dormant (or just unmentionable) in the recesses of a family’s collective memory’

Independent on Sunday ‘Harrowing, profound, and beautifully written’

Times ‘(A) superb Neo-Gothic ‘whydunnit’… deeply moving… the author’s precise, pared-down prose is perfect… O’Farrell textures the plot brilliantly, wrapping the bare bones in a rich flesh’

Big Issue ‘Dazzlingly good, a tale of love, grief and dysfunctional family life that grabs both the heart and the head. When I finished it, I’m not embarrassed to say, I wept’