What I learned from… ‘After The Storm’ by GD Wright
About the book
About the bookWhen local couple Andrew and Sophie take their daughter and her friend to the beach on a stormy day, they are momentarily distracted leading both children to get washed out to sea. Andrew dives in, but comes back ashore with only one child – his own daughter, Maria. Joe, the son of his best friend and local police officer, Chris, has drowned. But it was just a tragic accident…wasn’t it?
What I learned
After The Storm is a compelling, page-turner that’s not for the faint of heart. From the first page, the reader is taken into a comfortable world of families and friends, full of love and care. The world is then blown apart in the most shocking way with a young boy’s disappearance at sea, with the resulting shrapnel affecting the characters’ lives in the most harrowing way.
GD Wright does a great job at painting a small-town setting, then using a tragedy to show how people can turn on one another as they scramble to make sense of their lives in the aftermath. Wright’s police background also means the procedure of dealing with the tragedy and its repercussions is incredibly detailed and well written, with plenty of insight into the lives of the professionals who have to deal with the most horrific of situations.
The various narrators help move the story on from different perspectives and pull off the very difficult job of making the reader constantly question where their loyalties lie in a story that is anything but predictable. One shocking incident halfway through made me wonder where the story would go next, as nothing seemed sacred, and everything was up for grabs in the telling of the story.
GD Wright has done a fantastic job of creating a world that seems black and white, but is full of shades of grey (not that kind) and impossible moral questions.
More about this book
Published in 2024 by Avon Books
After The Storm at HarperCollins
After The Storm at Amazon.co.uk
About ‘What I learned…’
I read anything and everything and think there’s writing inspiration to take from from books of every genre.