'I read Donald Antrim's THE AFTERLIFE with admiration. This must have been a difficult book to write ... but he performs the dance artfully. Formally perfect, filled with grace, wit and the only sort of love that's worth offering' PETER CAREY, Irish Times Books of the Year ** 'Shocking, hilarious, painful; Louanne, the mammy, is no longer breathing, but she's still there, in every word. A bad ma, but a great, great book' RODDY DOYLE, Irish Times Books of the Year ** 'A mesmerising, novelistic story of a dysfunctional childhood ... THE AFTERLIFE unfolds with precision, bounded by structural elegance and masterful pacing. It is an intensely personal, admirable act of remembrance; a wry pilgrimage made powerful by the restraint and generosity that tempers every page' DAILY TELEGRAPH ** 'Very few [American memoirs] have the intelligence and grace of Antrim's remarkable, impressionistic account of his relationship with his mother ... Other writers might have been tempted to claim that they had come to some kind of final truth about their upbringing. Antrim does not. Aware of the shifting unreliability of memory, he presents a series of vignettes from his past that gradually construct a provisional portrait of his mother (and himself) that is all the more moving in its refusal to lay claim to finality' SUNDAY TIMES ** 'A highly unusual, yet beautiful, paean to his lost mother and vivid, disturbed childhood in rural America.