In the After, by Marian Frith

Anna is a 62-year-old woman in Sydney, who is the lone survivor of a terrorist attack. Nat is a 35-year-old Afghanistan veteran, who feels responsible for not preventing the attack by doing his job over there properly. The two form an unlikely and supportive friendship after Nat reaches out to apologise. Frith paints a vivid and horrifying picture of those enduring trauma and the difficulty of trying to adjust back into a ‘normal’ life while suffering the consequent PTSD. Survivor guilt, the fog of war; she delves beneath the clichés to make sense of the well-worn phrases, to make Anna and Nat’s experiences able to be understood. Unfortunately, she is less successful at depicting the actual people and their relationships with those around them. Anna comes the closest to a fully-rounded character but Nat is, at best, two-dimensional, while his wife and Anna’s children are as flat as tacks on the page. Their actions, behaviour and conversations are largely not credible, and they come across as obtuse, selfish or literally too good to be true. It’s a pity because this detracts from the otherwise strong sympathy evoked for Anna and Nat and the hope for recovery and redemption offered by their stories.