Living With The Aftermath

This very moving book on the shifting patterns of mourning and grief focuses on the experiences of Australian women who lost their husbands during the Second World War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The book makes use of extensive oral testimonies to illustrate how widows internalised and absorbed the traumas of their husband's war experience. Joy Damousi is able to demonstrate that a significant shift in attitudes towards grieving and loss came about between the mid century and the later part of the twentieth century. In charting the memory of grief and its expression, she discerns a move away from the denial and silence which shaped attitudes in the 1950s towards a much fuller expression of grief and mourning and perhaps a new way of understanding death and loss at the beginning of the new century.

The Aftermath offers the most comprehensive examination of the psychological impact of the Holocaust on survivors ever undertaken.

In 2003, Rachel Cusk published A Life's Work, a provocative and often startlingly funny memoir about the cataclysm of motherhood. Widely acclaimed, the book started hundreds of arguments that continue to this day. Now, in her most personal and relevant book to date, Cusk explores divorce's tremendous impact on the lives of women. An unflinching chronicle of Cusk's own recent separation and the upheaval that followed—"a jigsaw dismantled"—it is also a vivid study of divorce's complex place in our society. "Aftermath" originally signified a second harvest, and in this book, unlike any other written on the subject, Cusk discovers opportunity as well as pain. With candor as fearless as it is affecting, Rachel Cusk maps a transformative chapter of her life with an acuity and wit that will help us understand our own.

Cecilia has always been secure in her world. A high school cheerleader, she is pretty and popular. And she dates Ryan, one of the cutest boys in her school. She leads a charmed and pampered life. Clearly everyone forgot the warnings buried deep in the quatrains of Nostradamus-- the end of days. When the world they know is destroyed, will their struggle to survive destroy their love? This new normal-- this new life-- is cruel and unpredictable and tests both of them in ways that they've never imagined. But it's not the end, only the beginning, but the beginning of what? From what we've calculated, it's been seven days since The End. We don't really have a more suitable name for it. There was absolutely no warning. It was three days after Christmas. We were alone and scared. Nobody expected the theories and stories to actually come true. After 2012 passed with no strange activity, the whole idea of the apocalypse seemed like rubbish. But we were proven terribly wrong. Nostradamus got it right after all.

When David Herron—overwhelmed and despairing, his family’s business and finances in ruin due to the bursting lending bubble of 2008—takes his own life one chilly spring morning, he has no idea the ripple effect his decision will set into motion. Two years later, his widow, Jules, is now an employee of the bakery she and David used to own—and still full of bitterness over David’s lies, perceived cowardice, and ultimate abandonment of her and their now-teenage daughter, Rennie. Rennie, meanwhile, struggles socially at school, resents her work-obsessed mother, and is convinced she’s to blame for her father’s death. When Denise, the former police detective who worked (and, due to her own personal struggles at the time, mishandled) David’s case, catches sight of Rennie at her sons’ school, she’s struck by the girl’s halo of sadness—and becomes obsessed with attempting to right the wrongs she believes she perpetrated two years ago. And as all this unfolds in Boston, Daniel, the guilt-ridden young man who, in his old life as a banker, helped create the circumstances that led to David’s suicide, continues to punish himself for his sins by living half a life, working odd jobs and bouncing from one US city to another, never staying long enough to make friends or build something lasting. Ultimately, each of these very different people—all of them tied together by one tragic event—must learn in their own way how to say good-bye to the past and move into a brighter future.

"The mother of one of the two shooters at Columbine High School draws on personal recollections, journal entries and video recordings to piece together what led to her son's unpredicted breakdown and share insights into how other families might recognize warning signs,"--NoveList.

In a post-apocalyptic world overrun by cannibals and pollution, Claudia endures daily physical and psychological tests in order to survive, while gradually discovering that she has become a pawn in faraway manipulator's game.

A stunning, powerful blockbuster of passion, betrayal and conscience to rival Atonement and The End of the Affair. Hamburg, 1946. Thousands wander the rubble, lost and homeless. Charged with overseeing the rebuilding of this devastated city and the de-Nazification of its broken people, Captain Lewis is stationed in a grand house on the outskirts of the city, where he will be joined by his grieving wife, Rachael, and only remaining son, Edmund. But rather than force its owners, a German widower and his traumatized daughter, out onto the streets, Lewis insists that the two families live together. In this charged and claustrophobic atmosphere, all must confront their true selves as enmity and grief give way to passion and betrayal. The Aftermath is a stunning novel about our deepest desires, our fiercest loyalties and the humbling power of forgiveness.