After Me Comes the Flood: From the author of The Essex Serpent
As seen:
By Sarah Perry
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1 review
Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year award 2014
Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2014
One hot summer’s day, John Cole decides to leave his life behind.
He shuts up the bookshop no one ever comes to and drives out of London. When his car breaks down and he becomes lost on an isolated road, he goes looking for help, and stumbles into the grounds of a grand but dilapidated house. Its residents welcome him with open arms – but there’s more to this strange community than meets the eye. They all know him by name, they’ve prepared a room for him, and claim to have been waiting for him all along. As nights and days pass John finds himself drawn into a baffling menagerie. There is Hester, their matriarchal, controlling host; Alex and Claire, siblings full of child-like wonder and delusions; the mercurial Eve; Elijah – a faithless former preacher haunted by the Bible; and chain-smoking Walker, wreathed in smoke and hostility. Who are these people? And what do they intend for John?Elegant, gently sinister and psychologically complex, After Me Comes The Flood is a haunting and hypnotic debut novel by a brilliant new voice.
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An interesting and usual book that has a dreamy visionary like quality. The book is essentially about John Cole who takes a wrong turning and ends up arriving in a community in a large house - who mysteriously seem to be expecting him.The story seems very believable and at times had a creepy feel to it. The characters are all fully developed and the way that they interact with each other is very skillfully written. An intriguing story that kept me guessing to the very last page. Part mystery with a dystopian twist to it.
Sarah Davis - Greenwich Libraries
