After You've Gone

In After You've Gone, a historical novel set in Nova Scotia, New York, and Amsterdam, Jeffrey Lent beautifully charts the sweep of a life and the discovery—and loss—of life-defining love. Henry Dorn has spent years building a family, but it only takes a single afternoon for it to fall apart. The woman with whom he fell in love in the first blush of youth, who has been his perfect mate through a lively young marriage ripened by the raising of three children, has been lost. The car wreck that killed her also took their son Robert, a veteran of the Great War whose bitterness and addiction to morphine had slowly been driving him and Henry apart. Restless, broken, questing but unsure for what, Henry buys a steamer ticket for Amsterdam, planning to research his family history and start life anew. But nothing could have prepared him for the young woman he meets on the ship: the fiery, self-sufficient Lydia Pearce, one of a new generation of women. At first Henry does not know what to make of Lydia but, before long, they have fallen into an affair of a depth and significance for which neither was prepared. And just as quickly as he was robbed of Olivia, Henry is faced with the gift of new possibilities—and the need to reconcile them with those already lost. From a hardscrabble Nova Scotia fishing town, to a women's college in New York, to a 1920s Europe alive with the unbuttoning of sexuality but scarred by war, After You've Gone is a gorgeous tale spanning several pivotal decades in American life, and an unforgettable portrait of one man and the extraordinary women he loved.