After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

Perry writes with unerring power and hard-won wisdom.” —Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Negroland: A Memoir “What strikes me so strongly about this excellent memoir is that—considering the subject matter—the writer was able to organize it at all.  It’s sometimes disarmingly astute, and what it says about the ties that bind, at the same moment they sometimes get stretched way beyond capacity, elaborates not just this singular drama, but provides a painful , and wincingly real, statement about class in America.” —Ann Beattie, award-winning author of The State We’re In: Maine Stories, The New Yorker Stories, and more “After the Eclipse, Perry’s beautifully wrought account of her mother’s murder, is a profoundly important book. Praise for After the Eclipse"In an accom

Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction—all her questions finally answered. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah’s bedroom.   The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. She wanted to understand her mother’s life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.   Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light