The World After Alice (UK Edition)

The poignant debut novel of two families brought together to celebrate an unexpected marriage over a sunny Maine weekend, for fans of Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout.

When Morgan and Benji surprise their families with a wedding invitation to Maine, they’re aware their relationship will come as a shock. Twelve years have passed since the loss of sixteen-year-old Alice Weil, Benji’s sister and Morgan’s best friend. No one is quite the same. As the headstrong young couple brings the two families together for the first time since the funeral, they wonder: can old wounds truly be mended?

When the guests descend upon the tranquil coastal town for the whirlwind nuptials, it soon becomes clear that these estranged families are not ready to move on.

Will the fragile peace the wedding offers survive the sunny weekend? Or are these two families about to find out that the darkest secrets always come to light in the end?

About the Author

Lauren Aliza Green's work has appeared in Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train (winner of the New Writer’s Award), and elsewhere. She is the author of A Great Dark House, winner of the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship, and the inaugural recipient of the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award, sponsored by Poetry Ireland and Stanford University. Lauren lives in New York City.

Reviews

"A bouquet of a book: thoughtful, heartfelt, funny, tender, tough, and gorgeously written. It is a novel about how love won't save you, except in the ways that it does, about the pain of family life, and also its transcendent qualities. Green is a tremendous new writer" —Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book

"Intricately structured and elegantly written, The World After Alice is a family drama that pivots between the sweeping and the intimate in seamless, wildly entertaining prose" —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

"In The World After Alice, Lauren Aliza Green lays bare the mysteries of grief, growth, and love in the wake of unthinkable loss. Green writes with a poet’s ear and an impressionist’s eye, and the result is a wise, elegiac novel that is impossible to put down even after turning the last gorgeous page" —Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This

"A study of grief, resilience, and surprising joy in the face of incomprehensible loss. I know these characters will stay with me" —Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes

"In this truly elegant novel, two families come together to celebrate a wedding. But through Lauren Aliza Green’s precise, amusing, and beautiful writing, we get to explore the mysterious ways that joy and grief tangle together. Each character is tenderly drawn yet frighteningly real. I read this book, and the complicated relationships within, turning the pages as fast as I could, aching to understand the impossible" —Hanna Halperin, author of I Could Live Here Forever