Afterlife

Antonia Vega has just retired from teaching English at her college when her husband, Sam, dies suddenly. She is left to work out who she is without him, and the shocks keep coming. Her warmhearted but unstable sister disappears, and one evening Antonia comes home to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager waiting on her doorstep.

Antonia has always looked to the literature she loves for guidance, but the situations now facing her ask for more than words can give. The novel follows her as she weighs what we owe the people in crisis around us, whether they are family by blood or by circumstance, and how anyone can live in a broken world without losing faith in others or in themselves.

Julia Alvarez, the Dominican American author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, wrote this novel.