Even though the writing becomes more assured in the book’s second half, the dénouement is rushed and contrived, its trajectory lurching in several directions without the strong narrative threadĪn ambitious novel like “The Aftermath’’ needs. The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook review A British colonel shares his home with a German architect in postwar Hamburg in Rhidian Brook's promising but thinly developed novel Adam Mars-Jones. Buy The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook at Online bookstore bookzoo.in I books shopping online I Books online store I Buy books online I Novels I Best novels to.

Moreover, the narrative is predictable, hinging on a very likely love story that starts with a surprise meant to shock but is unconvincing because the characters have not been drawn with enough care to pull it off. And still, two weeks on, they had not ‘had a moment.’ ” Michael was weighing her down more heavily than he’d anticipated and he had not only misjudged this but made matters worse with the wrong words, then with no words. “She’d once been lithe in times of changed circumstance, but here she seemed quite demotivated, found everything rebarbative. In addition to clinkers like “No amount of elocution lessons could disguise it,” or “he’d caught her callow,” or Edmund at 11 thinking about his tutor Herr Lubert as “saturnine,” there are passages like this one with Morgan thinking about Rachael: The first third of this book, however, is full of stilted prose. We are brought up short by the realization of how much these Germans have suffered and are still suffering, and how the fog of war still obscured not only what was right and wrong, but what was truth and lie. His new work, The Aftermath,’’ is being developed as a feature film and apparently big things. Brook sets all these strands in place against a well-drawn picture of devastated Hamburg. Rhidian Brook is an award-winning English novelist who has also written stories and screenplays.

The aftermath by rhidian brook