Aftermath by 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 to 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 unsettled, the aftermath of war brings with it bitterness, loss and a chasm much vaster than the oceans that once lay between them.