Aftermath | Jackie Davis

With her husband Samuel serving as an artist in The Great War, Ivy Chapman secures a position managing the Auckland Free Library.

What begins as a necessity soon blossoms into something much more: a quiet awakening of her own capability, independence and allure. Ivy's sister Katherine, too, has experienced a taste of a different life in the absence of her husband George.

But as the ships bearing their husbands draw ever closer, the sisters must prepare themselves for a return to their lives before. Ivy is shocked to find the Samuel who steps off the Halifax bears little resemblance to the light-hearted and romantic young man she married but two years earlier. And for Katherine, is a 'return' even possible?

With an epidemic at their doorstep and a future that feels increasingly unsetted, the aftermath of war brings with it bitterness,loss and a chasm much vaster that the oceans that once lay between them.

'A moving and beautiful story about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events.'-Tina Shaw, author of A House Built On Sand

JACKIE DAVIS is a prose writer and poet. While at Victoria University, completing her MA in Creative Writing, she won the Lilian Isa Smith Award for original composition. The following year, her novel Breathe (2002), was published; her second novel, Swim, was released in 2003. She won the NZSA Foxton Fellowship in 2006, and her writing has appeared in a range of journals and magazines.