What will she build from what remains?
She built her life the way she designed interiors: composed, deliberate, controlled.
When her younger sister dies after a recurrence of cancer she had hidden from everyone, the New York designer becomes guardian to a fourteen-year-old boy who trusts no adult’s promises and a two-year-old girl who still calls for her mother in the night. She takes them to a cabin on the Nova Scotia coast for five days, and there, cautiously, the three of them begin to know one another. But while she is offline, a buried clause in a contract gives her biggest client the excuse to destroy the firm she spent twenty years building.
As her old life gives way, the people around her come into focus: a best friend holding her marriage together by choosing not to know, a university friend who raised a daughter alone and never told the father she existed, and a man on the coast who withdrew from love, believing his distance protected others. Each of them has built something careful in the place where something living should be, and each is nearing the moment when that architecture stops holding.
Told through contrasting psychological portraits, with moments of unexpected comedy, After the Younger One follows how people arrive at the decisions that shape their lives, and how those decisions change when their understanding of themselves, of others, and of the world begins to shift.
After the Younger One is the first book in the two-part literary series Somewhere in Beautiful Nova Scotia. For readers of Hello Beautiful, Tom Lake, and A Gentleman in Moscow.
