Book Club - Vikki Wakefield’s After You Were Gone

Final Draft - Great Conversations

“The day my daughter went missing, we were at war”

Abbie isn’t a bad mum. Like so many parents she is exhausted, overworked, trying her best when one day someone takes advantage and steals her daughter Sarah from a busy street market.

Six years later and Abbie has another life. She can never move on from that tragic day but she is trying. That is until a phone call offers the tantalizing hope; knowledge of Sarah.

All Abbie has to do is blow up her life…

Vikki Wakefield is a celebrated author of young adult fiction. After You Were Gone is her first foray into ‘adult’ fiction and fans of her writing will recognise the tense realism and sharply drawn characters that infuse her work.

The novel ostensibly unfolds dual narratives; Before and After the day that Sarah disappears. Within these stories we meet two very different versions of Abbie; one young and recklessly trying to define her life, the other cautiously rebuilding barely believing she might ever be whole.

Drawing these two Abbies together is the mysterious caller. Someone who knows what has happened to Sarah. Someone angry and who won’t stop until Abbie acknowledges some intangible piece of the past.

After You Were Gone is an expansive story about the ties that bind us together and what happens when we start to lose sight of those closest to us.

Abbie feels her life defined by her family and the close community she has grown up in. Most particularly she feels the claustrophobic weight of her mother’s expectations.

It is against these expectations that Abbie flees to the city and it is despite these expectations that Abbie returns pregnant and unsure of what her life now holds.

Bonds between mother and daughter run throughout the narrative and the title; After You Were Gone serves as a lament to the dream of a parent watching their child grow from dependence into their own self.

After You Were Gone also works as a challenge to identity. Throughout the novel Abbie must fight to define herself; against her mother, her best friend, her small town’s limited expectations of a young single mother. As these identities are stripped away she must struggle to recognise herself anew.

Then when she finally feels she might be free of the past, her mysterious antagonist strikes out at the very thing she has fought so long for; a new sense of self.

After You Were Gone is a gripping mystery. There is a real thrill in racing to try and uncover the mystery and I got the sense Wakefield understands this as she throws false turns and twists in the reader's way.

More than the mystery though, it is the journey of Abbie as she moves along something of a twisted distortion of the hero's quest to find her long lost daughter. There is a sense of tragic inevitability, we know she won’t like the answer. But we are compelled, like Abbie to see this out and face the shocking truth.

After You Were Gone is not what you think it is and the novel glories in rocketing the reader onto its conclusion. This is not a book to start late at night, you won’t be getting any sleep!