The Dark Room: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Rachel Seiffert

Genre Fiction

Vintage

Afterwards

To love someone, need you know everything about them? When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. Both are still young and hopeful of each other, but each brings with them an emotional burden. Alice's family is full of absences and Joseph harbours an unspeakable secret from his time in the army in Northern Ireland. When Alice's widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his RAF experiences in 1950s Kenya, something still raw is tapped in Joseph; his reaction to the older man's unburdening of guilt is both unexpected and devastating for them all.

Contemporary

Vintage Books USA

"The Dark Room" tells three stories that between them trace the legacy of the Nazi period on the lives of ordinary Germans. Helmut is a young photographer in Berlin in the 30's, who lives with a withered arm in a Nazi state that has little tolerance of the less than physically perfect. Finally called up in the closing months of the war, Helmut eventually has the chance to show his patriotic fervour. Lore is twelve as the war comes to an end. As both her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies, Lore crosses Germany, shepherding her three young siblings to eventual safety at the home of her grandmother. Half a century later, Micha, a young schoolteacher, becomes obsesses with the war record of his much loved, and now dead, grandfather, who was in the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front during the war. He eventually travels to Byelorussia, in his grandfather's footsteps, but returns with more questions and fewer answers, as he struggles to love his grandparents and deal with his country in the shadow of their pasts.

The Dark Room

Minerva

Rachel Seiffert’s first book, The Dark Room, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, announced the arrival of a major writer; Afterwards fulfills that promise with a stunning novel about war and its brutal after-effect.Alice is the protagonist of Afterwards, but this book is about the guilt harboured by people around her. There are two men in her life: her maternal grandfather, David, recently widowed, and her boyfriend, Joseph, each of whom keeps his past from his loved ones. David served in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion; Joseph, during a stint in the British army, served in Northern Ireland. Both, we learn, live with the memory of having killed in the line of duty. As Alice’s relationship with Joseph develops, she senses there is something about his past that he keeps hidden. This is particularly galling given the personal and emotional details she has revealed to him (namely, that Alice has never met her father, and her attempts to establish an epistolary relationship with him in adulthood foundered). After her grandmother’s death, Alice finds the time spent with her grandfather awkward. She doesn’t know him the way she did her grandmother, but feels obliged to visit and offer support. Gradually, it emerges that David’s cold manner is traceable to events in Kenya, where he and his wife met. And as Alice tries to get to the bottom of Joseph’s reticence, a series of heated family discussions brushes ever closer to David’s secrets.

William Heinemann

The Walk Home

Virago

A Boy in Winter

Literary

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Books by Rachel Seiffert