♥ After The Fall || Charity Norman || Review ♥

What do you do when your family's dream becomes a nightmare? Combining the skill of Jodi Picoult with the warmth of Anita Shreve, Charity Norman explores - with heart-thumping tension - a fresh start which goes very badly wrong. In the quiet of a New Zealand winter's night, a rescue helicopter is sent to airlift a five-year-old boy with severe internal injuries. He's fallen from the upstairs veranda of an isolated farmhouse, and his condition is critical. At first, Finn's fall looks like a horrible accident; after all, he's prone to sleepwalking. Only his frantic mother, Martha McNamara, knows how it happened. And she isn't telling. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Tragedy isn't what the McNamara family expected when they moved to New Zealand. For Martha, it was an escape. For her artist husband Kit, it was a dream. For their small twin boys, it was an adventure. For sixteen-year-old Sacha, it was the start of a nightmare. They end up on the isolated east coast of the North Island, seemingly in the middle of a New Zealand tourism campaign. But their peaceful idyll is soon shattered as the choices Sacha makes lead the family down a path which threatens to destroy them all. Martha finds herself facing a series of impossible decisions, each with devastating consequences for her family.

 This book has been on my tbr for a few months, not as long as some - but still sufficient time, I had heard good things, but its not a book that I recognise as been "big" shall we say- but if I recall rightly it was on Richard & Judys book list- so that's something?

As begin the journey, we meet Martha in the middle of the night, as one of her twin boys is airlifted to hospital, he fell she says - she is the only one who knows what happens, and is adamant that he fell - she cant tell can she? This book was a slow builder, gripping and thrilling. The family have made a move to New Zealand for a fresh start, its for the best isn't it? What the family needs? Or at least that is what Martha keeps telling herself, but not is all as it seems.

Do you ever get the impression the author is leading you to the answers, but allowing you to make your own conclusions? After the fall took me to so many different places, non of which where the answers - what concluded was far beyond my train of thought and was ah-mazing . It had all the aspects of some of my favourite authors - that of Jodi Picolut and Diane Chamberlain.

The narrative flows from the fateful day, as Martha is sat tight in hospital waiting on news of her little boy, and leading up to the big move and onto the day it all went wrong, it was a gripping read, one that you felt you where sat watching unfold and powerless to help. The description of the scenery is always something I look for, and this was wonderful and whilst I read this book slower than I usually do - it enabled to savour each page and everything that was happening around me.

5/5

Charity Norman was born in Uganda and brought up in successive draughty vicarages in Yorkshire and Birmingham. After several years' travel she became a barrister, specialising in crime and family law in the northeast of England. Also a mediator, she is passionate about the power of communication to slice through the knots. In 2002, realising that her three children had barely met her, she took a break from the law and moved with her family to New Zealand. Her first novel, Freeing Grace, was published in 2010 and her second, Second Chances, in 2012 (published in the UK as After the Fall). The Son-in-Law, her third novel, was published in 2013.
Charity currently lives in Napier, New Zealand