This image is the cover for the book After Before

After Before

Three women, beset by trauma, temptation, and regret, find each other in this “rich, haunted, gripping” novel (Ruth Padel, award-winning author of Beethoven Variations).

That was the day that Mama made the rules: If they come, run. Be quiet and run. But not together. Never together. If one is found, at least the other survives… 

During a cold British winter, three women, each suffering her own demons, reach a crisis point. Emily, an immigrant survivor of the Rwandan genocide, is existing but not living. Vera, a newly Christian Londoner, is striving to live a moral life, her happiness constantly undermined by secrets from her past. Lynn, battling with an untimely disease, is consumed by bitterness and resentment of what she hasn’t achieved and what has been snatched from her. 

Their lives have been torn open by betrayal: by other people, by themselves, by life itself. But as their paths interweave, they begin to unravel their beleaguered pasts, and inadvertently change each other’s futures.

Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

Jemma Wayne

Born to an American musician father, and English mother, Jemma Wayne grew up in Hertfordshire and studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University and Broadcast Journalism at the University of Westminster. She began her career as a journalist at The Jewish Chronicle, and later as a columnist for The Jewish News. She is now a regularly featured blogger at The Huffington Post and continues to contribute to a variety of other publications. Her first play, Negative Space, was staged in 2009 at Hampstead’s New End Theatre, receiving critical acclaim.

Jemma’s debut novel After Before was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award.

Legend Press