“That’s the thing about falling. It doesn’t go on indefinitely, and it rarely ends well . . . ”
In her page-turning fiction debut, neuropsychologist Kylie Ladd delivers a searing portrait of two marriages united and betrayed by friendship.
“I had been married three years when I fell in love,” begins Kate, a firecracker of a woman who thought she’d found the yin to her yang in Cary, her sensible and adoring husband. For their friend Luke—a charismatic copywriter who loves women and attention in equal measure, and preferably together—life has been more than sweet beside Cressida, the dutiful pediatric oncologist who stole his heart. But when a whimsical flirtation between Kate and Luke turns into something far more dangerous, the foursome will be irrevocably intertwined by more than just their shared history.
After the Fall follows the origin and fallout of the most passionate of affairs through the eyes of all four characters, unveiling the misunderstandings and unspoken needs that lie beneath our search for love and connection. The narrative moves effortlessly between past and present, painting a nostalgic picture of the two marriages at their most idealistic—the exact moment when like turned to love—and at their most volatile. Thanks to the boundless compassion with which Ladd draws her characters, one can’t help but root for them as they wrestle between newfound desire and remembrances of time past, all the while spinning toward an inevitable conclusion.
Steeped in psychological insight and raw emotion, After the Fall is an unsettling novel of the many ways we love and hurt each other.
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My 5 Star Review
Wow! Wow! Wow!
That is the only word that I can form now,
I think I need a minute.
I was and still am beyond pissed at Luke
and Kate for everything that they have done. I mean Luke is a prick who thinks
he is God's gift to women and has a gorgeous wife. While she is in the hospital
trying to save children from cancer he is out playing golf or going to the pub
after work.
Then there is Kate who openly flirts with
anyone out in public, even if her husband is there. Ugh...and her husband Carey
is as sweet as can be, how can she do that to him?!
I listened to the audio version of this
book and I was randomly cursing these two characters and then I sat back and
wondered how often this happens. How often do couples become friends and then
cheat on their spouses with those very same friend?!
I will say that I was not sure how this
book was going to be. What I did enjoy was that I heard from Luke, Kate, and
both of their spouses.
The ending killed me because I was so
sure that it would go a unique way, but overall this is an obsessive read. As
in I was determined to finish this book and see which one of them would come
clean, get caught, and or get divorced.
About the Author:
Kylie Ladd has written about parenting, the World Cup, meeting her husband on jury service, egg donation, the Edinburgh Festival, the prefrontal cortex and losing her religion, but all people ever ask her about are the dirty bits in her novels and if they're made up. Her first novel, After the Fall, was published in Australia, the US and Turkey, while her second, Last Summer, was highly commended in the 2011 Federation of Australian Writers Christina Stead Award for fiction. Kylie’s third novel, Into My Arms, has been selected as one of Get Reading’s Fifty Books You Can’t Put Down for 2013. She holds a PhD in neuropsychology, and lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband and two children.
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