The After Life

A powerful, heartbreaking and yet at times irresistibly comic memoir of childhood and madness.

"We were a happy family - if you don't count the divorce, the drugs, the madness, and the suicide."

Kathleen Stewart has published seven works of fiction, a book of short stories, and two collections of poems, and has been widely admired and praised for her writing.

Yet nothing she has produced so far could have prepared readers for this memoir. Centred on the author's experiences in her last year at school, which included drug addiction, a feverish love affair, a suicide attempt, and a mysteriously calm interlude in a psychiatric hospital, it also reaches both back and forward in time in an attempt to come to terms with her father's successful suicide and with the presence of her brilliant, charismatic and utterly self-absorbed mother.

Written in prose of rare clarity and elegance, this powerful, heartbreaking and yet at times irresistibly comic memoir will remind some readers of similar depictions of childhood and madness by writers such as Raimond Gaita and Janet Frame.

Kathleen Stewart was born in Sydney in 1958. She is the author of seven novels: The Black Butterfly, The Red Room, Nightflowers, Spilt Milk (shortlisted for the 1995 NSW Premier's Literary Awards), Louis: A Normal Novel, Victim Train, and Waiting Room; and has published two collections of poetry: Snow (short-listed for the 1994 Banjo Awards and the 1994 Age Book of the Year), and The White Star. She currently resides in the Blue Mountains.

Reviews:

" ... exquisite, haunting, gripping, intense and so beautifully written."Luke Davies, author of CANDY

"It has something of WUTHERING HEIGHTS about it ... a miracle of transformation of suburban Australia into some land of otherness, where nothing is as it appears, and no one is his true self."Susan Johnson, author of A BETTER WOMAN and THE BROKEN BOOK

"The most gripping memoir I have read in years."Richard Aedy, Life Matters, ABC Radio National

The After Life
Random House Australia
Author: Kathleen Stewart
ISBN: 9781741667271
RRP: $34.95