The chance, after years of living in desperate danger from the Nazis, to strike back. Life with the partisans offers Felix another opportunity too. It’s in After that the twelve year old Felix gains his first medical experience, living in the forest with a group of partisan fighters and assisting their doctor. We learn in Now that Felix has spent his long and productive life as a surgeon, operating on and transforming the lives of many children. After, I came to realise, is about the period in Felix’s life when he starts to do more than that. Thus far in his life, as one would expect when a boy has the full force of the Nazi terror dedicated to obliterating him, Felix has spent a lot of his time running and hiding. Now jumps forward seventy years, After leaps back sixty-eight. The story starts in 1944, when Felix is forced to move on after hiding for two years under Gabriek’s barn. Which is why eventually, and in the full knowledge of what I was asking of my readers, I wrote After. I tried to push him to the very back of my imagination, behind several other books I was planning to write.īut if you’ve read any of the Felix books you’ll know he’s not a character who gives up easily. When Felix started letting me know, soon after I finished Now, that there were big chunks of his life I’d skipped over and that he needed me to go back and explore some of those times with him, I resisted. (Come to think of it, that might have been a reader driving the big car .) I know, not something a reader wants to hear. My only excuse is that sometimes writers have to put their characters first.

Which is why I regret the whiplash I may have caused my dear readers by writing this book. Years ago a big car smashed into my small car and I suffered whiplash, so I know what an unpleasant experience it is. After I woke up and had a stretch as usual and got dirt under my fingernails as usual, I heard voices above me in the barn.

After book by morris gleitzman