The Aftermath

SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM STARRING KEIRA KNIGHTLEY Set in post-war Germany, the international bestseller The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook is a stunning emotional thriller about our fiercest loyalties and our deepest desires. In the bitter winter of 1946, Rachael Morgan arrives with her only remaining son Edmund in the ruins of Hamburg. Here she is reunited with her husband Lewis, a British colonel charged with rebuilding the shattered city. But as they set off for their new home, Rachael is stunned to discover that Lewis has made an extraordinary decision: they will be sharing the grand house with its previous owners, a German widower and his troubled daughter. In this charged atmosphere, enmity and grief give way to passion and betrayal. 'Profoundly moving, beautifully written. Ponders issues of decency, guilt and forgiveness' Independent 'Terrific. Suspicion, resentment and misunderstanding haunt this city. Richly atmospheric' Sunday Telegraph 'An extraordinary read' Daily Mail

"Usman Khan was convicted of convicted of terrorism-related offenses at age 20, and sent to high security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for an event marking the fifth anniversary of Learning Together, a prison education program he had participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers' Hall, some of whom he called friends. Then he went to the restroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Jack Merritt, 25, who was killed in the attack, oversaw the program; Usman Khan was one of her students. "It is the immediate aftermath," Taneja writes. "'I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh.' The I is not mine, it is ours." In this bold and searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, Taneja draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to contemplate the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is an attempt to regain trust after violence and recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition"--Publisher's description.

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.

Claudia seeks to escape the live action game known as The Aftermath.

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.

After her brother's death from a heart defect, Lucy starts seventh grade at a new school—whose students survived a shooting four years ago—and must navigate different kinds of grief and healing

A powerful personal narrative of recovery and an illuminating philosophical exploration of trauma On July 4, 1990, while on a morning walk in southern France, Susan Brison was attacked from behind, severely beaten, sexually assaulted, strangled to unconsciousness, and left for dead. She survived, but her world was destroyed. Her training as a philosopher could not help her make sense of things, and many of her fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits were shattered. At once a personal narrative of recovery and a philosophical exploration of trauma, this bravely and beautifully written book examines the undoing and remaking of a self in the aftermath of violence. It explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, memory and truth, identity and self, autonomy and community. It offers imaginative access to the experience of a rape survivor as well as a reflective critique of a society in which women routinely fear and suffer sexual violence. As Brison observes, trauma disrupts memory, severs past from present, and incapacitates the ability to envision a future. Yet the act of bearing witness, she argues, facilitates recovery by integrating the experience into the survivor's life's story. She also argues for the importance, as well as the hazards, of using first-person narratives in understanding not only trauma, but also larger philosophical questions about what we can know and how we should live.

The second book in a New Adult fiction series from USA Today bestselling author R.J. Prescott. Cormac "The Hurricane" O'Connell's star is on the rise. Billed as the most promising young boxer of his generation, his new career is taking him to places he never dreamed. But O'Connell only needs one thing in life: his wife. In her final year of college, Em cannot follow him around the world but together they make it work. Just when everything they ever wanted is on the horizon, the past resurfaces to haunt them, and O'Connell realizes that justice might not be a part of his happy ever after. He couldn't protect Em once before, but in the aftermath of the hurricane, he will make sure that never happens again.

This book is to remind you that raging storms come in different aspects, bearing distractions with life alterations. No matter how settled family structures appear to be, just know it’s all in your response. The response you give to your storm determines your aftermath process. Your response once your life’s storm hits your landfall—your household—can create more destruction than what the storm originally released. Therefore, I’ve penned out my story with the hope of assisting the readers rebuild from the aftermath of life’s ruins created from the storm of life.

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