Alice McDermott's masterful novel is a portrait of a working-class American family living through the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth century. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter fruits of the sexual revolution, their older brother, Jacob, finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Clare, the youngest child, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. As their parents, John and Mary, struggle to uphold the family's framework, the four siblings are destined to experience the challenges and liberties born in the crucible of the 1960s. With McDermott's inimitable understanding and grace, "After This" captures the joy, sorrow, anger and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.

'McDermott's elegant, understated prose slips down like a cool, refreshing drink' Sunday Telegraph 'McDermott is a genius of quiet observation. Her antenna is perpetually raised and turning, humming and warm with reception ... one of our finest novelists at work today' Los Angeles Times 'McDermott never wastes a detail and her sentences have an undertow of significance. They seem to swell, as if the language itself were corseted ... Immaculate' New York Times Book Review 'There's no one like McDermott ... her touch is light as a feather, her perceptions purely accurate' Elle

Alice McDermott is the author of five novels including Child of My Heart, Charming Billy (winner of the 1998 National Book Award), At Weddings and Wakes, A Bigamist's Daughter and That Night, all published by Bloomsbury. She lives with her family outside Washington DC.