Here After: A Memoir

Here After: A Memoir

Amy Lin

Published March 5, 2024

  • A USA TODAY Bestseller
  • Starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and Library Journal
  • A March Book of the Month Selection
  • An Apple Books “Best Book of March”
  • A SheReads and ELLE Most Anticipated Book of 2024

 

Here After is an intimate story of deep love followed by dizzying loss; a stunning, taut memoir from debut author Amy Lin so finely etched and powerful that it will alter readers' hearts.

 

 

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“When he dies, I fall out of time.”



Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds’ move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy’s family. It is the last time she sees her husband alive.



Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment.



What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest accounting of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held “truths” about what the grieving process looks like. 



Here After is a love story and a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis’ death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory. Its power will last with you long after the final page.

Here After: A Memoir

Memoir

Amy Lin

Visit Amy's Website Watch the Book Trailer Here After Reading Guide Q&A with Amy Lin Book Club Kit

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Featured Press

This book is a little wonder—a clear, utterly courageous act of love.
A beautifully visceral and emotionally intimate depiction of young widowhood.
Lin’s memoir dazzles. Each chapter breathes with urgency.
Told in short, poetic vignettes that stun in their depth, love, and pain. It's heartbreaking, beautiful, and above all, honest with . . . a small light of hope. Highly recommended.
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Meet the author

Amy Lin

Amy Lin is a writer and educator who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her work has been published in Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala.

get to know Lin

What people are saying...

“It has been years since I have been so rocked, so moved, by any book, as I have been by Here After by the earthquaking new talent Amy Lin. Lin invites us into this place of exquisite pain and beauty; what a great gift she has given us.”

Lauren Groff

 author of Fates and Furies

“Here After is a searing account of a young couple’s lost future and a writer’s descent into the soul-ravaging, shape-shifting wilderness of grief. Amy Lin writes with devastating clarity about the wounds that do not heal, the stories that remain forever fractured, and love’s enduring force. This is a profound and essential memoir.”

Laura van den Berg

author of The Third Hotel

"Here After is perfectly titled. Amy Lin's memoir of love and loss is heartbreaking and true. Having navigated my own path through grief, there was much I could identify with within these pages. Lin's writing is vivid, episodic, and unflinching—much like grief itself."

Shannon Leone Fowler

author of Traveling With Ghosts

“Amy Lin knows her way around grief and its constant present tense. Grief is always with us; here are words to go with it, a writer who will accompany you on its long walk. This book made room for my tears and it will make room for yours if you let it.”

Matthew Salesses

author of Craft in the Real World

This is the kind of book you give to your friends, you give to your mother, to your sister. Hey I even gave it to my therapist! It helps understand all encompassing grief so well. I would hold my husband close at night every night. I would see how absolutely AWFUL it would be to lose my best friend. Her short tid bits made them even more impactful, because life is lived in moments. Loved it. Loved it. Get it. Gift it. Share it.

Andrea Iriarte

Molly's Bookstore, Melrose, Massachusetts

Why Zibby Loves It…

Amy Lin’s poetic, lyrical, and raw memoir HERE AFTER is one of the most real, moving, and beautiful depictions of what the immediate aftermath of grief looks like. It is a brilliant depiction of young love and equally brilliant of heartbreak, not just from the loss of a loved one but from learning that life itself is not a given and the world is not a safe space.

Amy’s personal prose, her honesty when writing about even parts of herself that she wasn’t proud of, let us into who she is in exquisite detail. You can’t not love Amy or root for her after reading her story. Amy is a true writer, someone who can make magic on the page and turn the worst tragedy imaginable into art. I am obsessed.