After You, Julie Buxbaum
After You, Julie Buxbaum
1 Rating(s)
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
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After You

Author: Julie Buxbaum

Narrator: Amber Sealey

Unabridged: 10 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/25/2009


Synopsis

The complexities of a friendship. The unexplored doubts of a marriage. And the redemptive power of literature...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.

About The Author

Julie Buxbaum is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School. The author of The Opposite of Love, she currently lives in London.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tea on February 12, 2014

Good c'est la vie story... About love, loss, death, birth, life, grief, friendship, family, parenthood, childhood, marriage, doubts, weddings, divorces... All in one book and one story... :) Well written and one that catches you from the start and don't leave you till the last page... I fell in love......more

Goodreads review by Leah on August 25, 2010

When Ellie learns of the murder of her best friend Lucy, she does what any friend would do, and drops everything and heads to London to look after Lucy’s daughter, Sophie, and to pick up the pieces. Sophie, as expected, is struggling with her mum’s death and has stopped talking. Desperate to get the......more

Goodreads review by PinkAmy loves books, cats and naps on March 29, 2020

4.5 STARS After Lucy’s murder, her best friend Ellie flies across the pond to London to help care for her daughter Sophie. While helping her goddaughter adapt, Ellie pulls further from her husband as she reconciles not just Lucy’s death, but that of Oliver, Ellie’s unborn son. AFTER YOU is an ode to m......more

Goodreads review by Charlene on July 27, 2009

I won this book from the Good reads site. The story follows Ellie, who is trying to recover from a still born and the slow destruction of her marriage. Ellie's childhood friend, Lucy, is murdered in an upscale part of London while walking her 8 year old daughter, Sophie, to school. Ellie flies to Lo......more

Goodreads review by Winna on May 22, 2012

After reading the Opposite of Love, I expected After You to be just as amazing. And it's not bad or anything, it's just that maybe I've expected too much. We get sucked into Ellie's world immediately, the chaos and loss of a best friend, a husband, a life. But then, I'm not sucked into Ellie as a per......more


Quotes

“I sat down to start Julie Buxbaum's glorious second novel, After You, and could not get up until I was finished After You is a surprising, funny, and deeply moving novel about how we learn to take care of the people who matter most to us—and, if we are lucky, learn to care for ourselves in the process.  With Buxbaum's signature wit and warmth, After You is the perfect companion to The Opposite of Love.  Read it.  Just make sure you have nowhere to be that day...”—Laura Dave, author of The Divorce Party

“Pitch-perfect from the very first page, After You is a tender, gripping story of how far we sometimes need to wander in order to find our way back home. A must-read for anyone who has ever wondered how to jump start her life, and really, isn’t that all of us?” — Allison Winn Scotch, author of Time of My Life

“Buxbaum writes with honesty and grace about the things we know about our friends and the things we wish we didn't.   After You highlights—beautifully and compellingly—the truth that sometimes we have to
lose the people closest to us to find ourselves."—Jodi Picoult, author of Handle with Care and My Sister’s Keeper


Awards

  • American Library Association Reading List