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A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search
by Sarah Perry
A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life.
When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah's bedroom.
The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction—all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah's questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother's life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.
Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.
"[Perry] wonderfully evokes her mother even as she struggles to unravel the mystery of her death...Perry's memoir is a testament to one child's ability to survive the unspeakable, one woman's ability to recapture what was lost, and a fascinating small-town mystery with breathtaking revelations at the end." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In an accomplished debut memoir, a daughter struggles to understand the life of her mother, who was murdered when the author was 12... deft pacing and vivid portraits result in an absorbing mystery and a forthright memoir of abiding grief." —Kirkus Reviews
"After The Eclipse is a tragedy set in motion by the vicious murder of a plucky young woman, the author's mother. It's a tender elegy for her too, and for the life she made with and for her daughter. Crystal Perry was much more than a victim, and Sarah Perry gives her vibrant life here. She does the same for the small, working class Maine town they both grew up in: the woes passed down through generations; the feelings (rage and guilt, grief), acted out but mostly unspoken. Perry writes with unerring power and hard-won wisdom." —Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Negroland: A Memoir
"After the Eclipse, Perry's beautifully wrought account of her mother's murder, is a profoundly important book. In this gripping tale of the search for the killer, Perry examines the issues her mother faced in her brief life: poverty, the search for home and, most importantly, the deadly and all-too-common issue of violence against women. Part memoir, part true crime, Eclipse is a clear-eyed, captivating portrait of a life cut short. With this book, Perry writes her mother back into the world." —Alison Smith, author of Name All the Animals
This information about After the Eclipse was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Perry is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a Poets & Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Perry is the recipient of the 2018 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and a fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation. She holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Columbia University and will serve as the 2019 McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College.
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