The Afterwards

Fact: Ember and Ness are best friends.

There's nothing more to say about it. It is what it is. It is what it will always be. Ember & Ness.

Then Ness dies. It is sudden and unexpected and leaves Ember completely empty. How can this be?

When Ember finds a way into the Afterworld, she determines to bring Ness back. Because that's what friends do, isn't it? They rescue each other. They help. They never give up.

Ember and Ness. that don't change.


A powerful, poignant, darkly comic and deeply moving story about friendship at its most extraordinary.

(If you’d like a little more explanation, you can read reviews here, here, here or here (and doubtlessly elsewhere too).)



Longlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal (2020).

Selected for inclusion in the International Youth Library White Ravens recommendations for 2019.

Featured on EmpathyLab’s Read for Empathy 2020 list.


To buy a copy of The Afterwards, signed by A.F. Harrold, for £9 (including UK P&P), just click the link below. (For overseas postage please contact me first.)


To download the audiobook version, read by the wonderful Sarah Ovens, visit either Audible or iTunes.


A bonus story…

The Afterwards was included by EmpathyLab on their 2020 Read for Empathy booklist, and to celebrate Empathy Day 2020 they invited me and Emily (along with a fine bunch of other authors) to create an Empathy Short. We made a little piece that’s a sort of prequel vignette to The Afterwards, a scene from Ember and Ness’s lives before the events of the book occurred. To read this tiny story, click here.


Here’s a video of me getting the first copy of the original hardback, and a video review by Whateverfloatsyourboat, which will tell you a bit more about the story…


All of the art, illustration and general wonder on this page is by Emily Gravett.