Shared trauma has driven them a world apart; they will need to find each other again to begin to heal.
Nightmares still haunt Chloe thirteen years after a tragedy led to the disintegration of her family. Ever since, her mother, Jules—busy with her tech career and battling a long history of chronic pain—has had little time for Chloe. When Chloe drops out of university to travel for a year, Jules’s dependency on opiates quickly escalates.
Aftershock follows the parallel journeys of both women: Jules struggles to regain control of her life, while Chloe, after a rocky visit with her estranged father in New Zealand, resolves to go off the map completely. When Jules suddenly can’t reach her daughter, the feeling is all too familiar, and she becomes determined to find her. Mother and daughter will need to address old secrets and the emotional impact they have wrought on both their lives before they can reconcile with each other and, eventually, with themselves.
Winner of the 2021 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award at the Atlantic Book Awards.
Nominated for 2021 Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Award.
Aftershock
Buy Aftershock:
“Alison Taylor’s debut novel, Aftershock, is a riveting exploration of two tough women, a mother and a daughter, on separate but similar journeys, to figure out who they want to be and how to love each other again.”
“A debut novel that jumps off the page, Aftershock is a wonderfully fresh and contemporary story about the ways that modern life tests the bonds between a mother and daughter. I was completely hooked from the start.”
“Aftershock is a sharp, cinematic portrait of a parent and child on parallel journeys of self-discovery, through the lows of addiction and the highs of young queer love. The skillful depiction of these two characters, and the failure of empathetic understanding between them, reminds us that what we see of others—even the people we think we know best—is the thinnest layer of ice over an ocean, leagues deep.”