The Sequel
Anna Williams-Bonner is the widow of Jacob Bonner, who wrote a wildly successful novel called Crib. They were married for not quite a year before he committed suicide, after a harassment campaign accusing him of plagiarism.
Anna is Jacob’s literary executor. Together with his agent and publisher, she handles arrangements for publishing his posthumous novel, as well as deals for tv and film productions of both books.
Interviewers start asking her what she’s planning next. On a whim, she says that she’s going to write a novel of her own. At first she isn’t serious — but then she thinks “how hard can it be?” She writes most of a first draft at a New Hampshire writer’s retreat, then finishes back home. When the novel comes out, with the help of “the top agent in the country,” it’s reviewed in the New York Times and quickly becomes a bestseller. Titled The Afterward, the book is based on Anna’s own experiences coping after her husband committed suicide. Fans love the book, especially for how empathetically it deals with the death of a loved one.
It’s not a spoiler if I tell you that Anna is not quite the plucky, tragic figure she’s initially presented as: the novel starts giving us hints about this quite early. The first hint is a statement: “She had gone to a good deal of trouble in order to be Jake’s widow.”
When her publicist is planning a book tour, we get a second hint about Anna’s secret past: she avoids Atlanta because “it’s too close to Athens, where she’d spent a year a long time ago.”
At a book signing, she finds a post-it note stuck inside one of the books mentioning a name that no one should know she has any connection to. Then someone leaves her an envelope with excerpts from a novel that shouldn’t exist, because she destroyed it. Further events suggest that someone knows more about Anna, and secrets from her past, than she can accept.
Anna begins a secret search to find out who this person is, and eliminate the danger that they represent. Much suspense and many twists follow, making this very much a page-turner.
This book can be read as a standalone, but — as its title says — it’s indeed a sequel, following directly on the events in The Plot, its predecessor. (See my review of that book here.) I highly recommend both of them, and you might like to begin with the first in the series, though if you start with this one you won’t go wrong. (And I see they are now being referred to as The Book Series, which suggests there may be yet another follow-on book to come.)
Jean Hanff Korelitz was born in 1961 to Jewish parents in New York City and grew up there. She graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in English, followed by studies at Cambridge University in England.
Her 2014 novel, You Should Have Known, was adapted for HBO as “The Undoing”, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland. Admission, published in 2009, was adapted in 2013 as a film of the same name starring Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin and Paul Rudd. The Sequel is her ninth novel, and is in fact a sequel—to her seventh, The Plot (published in 1921, deemed “insanely readable” by Stephen King). In between, she published The Latecomer (2022).
She is married to an award-winning Irish poet, Paul Muldoon; they have two children, now grown, and live in New York.
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