When Ash meets Poppy on a school trip despite their very different backgrounds the two girls know their relationship is special.

However as their lives progress as they get closer, tragedy strikes and suddenly they're ripped apart from each other only for their lives to unite again in a tragedy to bring them back together again, can their love survive in the after life as it was in real life?

The book was super sweet especially up to the halfway turning point of the drama of which after everything takes a darker shift as the girls lives change dramatically a sweet lgbt relationship with a sinister death twist it keeps you on your toes reading and felt like two books merged together and I feel would make a great film or series to see where the girls end up!

Many thanks to the publishers for allowing me to review this book for them!

Afterlove starts with a reaping on a cliff and goes back in time to tell the story of how Ash came to be standing on that cliff, starting with her meeting Poppy on a boat trip. Look, you know Ash is going to fall in love, and that she's going to die and become a reaper; those aren't spoilers, they're right there in the blurb. What we don't know is how all this will happen and how forcefully Tanya will rip your heart from your chest in the process. I spent every moment until THE moment waiting for it to happen, trying to guess how, putting the book down every time I thought it might be about to happen. It is a tense read.

I loved Ash from the opening lines, her voice is so powerful and her emotions so raw, that she sucks you right into her story. Her romance with Poppy is just the most beautiful from "I already know where our first kiss will be"until the last moments. We feel her emotions, we join her as she falls head over heels for Poppy, and that makes her death, when it comes, all the more heartbreaking. I am not a person prone to feelings, but I sobbed hard at that scene.

There are, of course, other people in their story too. Adara, Ash's best friend, was a personal favourite; she loves Ash and is fiercely protective of her. Ash's sister and parents are adorable. I loved seeing them together as a family, they are warm and caring, and the richness of Ash's Indo-Guyanese culture really shines through when she's with her family. It also added an interesting dimension to Ash being "out" as a lesbian (homosexuality is illegal in Guyana) and we see her mum quietly struggling to reconcile these beliefs with how much she just wants Ash to be happy. There's one particular scene between Ash and her mum (you will know it when you read it) that made me cry happy tears. Her family are a stark contrast to Poppy's who are almost never home and not that interested in her when they are.

Ash does not go easily into the afterlife. It's confusing and, obviously, she doesn't want to be dead. I was struck by how much Ash worried in that moment for the other people who would be affected by her disappearance. Her struggle was hard to read. The depiction of the afterlife itself is amazing: the bookshop, Dev and Esen (her fellow reapers), and Deborah, the librarian in charge, Charon and his little boat. I would be up for living that version of an afterlife. I loved everything about this little group of reapers. The afterlife has a lot of upsides, but it also has strict rules and strict consequences for not following them.

There are some dark twists in this book, some things that happen that you wish with all your heart didn't, and moments that, to quote Tanya, make you feel "desperately, unreachably sad". This book was the biggest emotional roller coaster I have ever been on.

I've yet to meet a Tanya Byrne book I didn't love, but Afterlove was a new level of awesome. Tanya writes everything so beautifully that it feels like a constant assault on your feelings. There were so many moments that I had to put the book down to just sit with the words for a while. I will never get enough of this book. It is one I am going to read over and over again, until either the book or I fall apart.

I have been meaning to read more LGBTQ+ books and this books was an amazing introduction to the genre. I loved the extra element of the afterlife added into the story, the characters where both enjoyable to read about and i was genuinely rooting for the relationship the whole time that i was reading the book. i would be interested in reading more books by the author as i think that her general writing style is beautiful and the creativity that went into writing this book was great!

Bold, engrossing, and charged with emotion, Byrne has delivered an unforgettable narrative. Ash and Poppy’s story will stay with me for years to come.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hodger Children’s for an early copy of Afterlove.


I don’t know about you, but when I think about grim reapers, the first thing that comes to mind is NOT a achingly beautiful love story.

And yet.

Tanya Byrne manages to turn something sad into something beautiful. A tragedy into a love story.

This book has different strengths, starting with its main character, Ash. She is a wonderful narrator, telling her story with a voice that’s simultaneously funny, touching, and very vulnerable. It’s full of fears and hopes, and that might well be the main thing that helps this book stand out. Sometimes, narrators in books are unlikeable and a touch too shallow. None of that here; you truly feel for Ash’s struggles and live her love story right by her side.

And if the main character is so good, what of the other ones? Well, no disappointment to be found there either. Not even mentioning the wonderful diversity of the cast, each character has their own personality, and all of them make for a great read. You really do want to get to know them better, and I could very well see the author writing a sequel about one (or more!) of them.

Now, another of the book’s strengths lies in its unusual setting. Whereas YA literature might sometimes seem to follow the same settings and stories with every book, this one is truly out of the ordinary. The way it’s divided into two very distinct parts works to keep the reader hooked.

Finally, the ending. Ah, endings are always such an issue with me. It’s very rare that I’m fully satisfied with them, but with Afterlove, the last chapter was beautiful, moving, and just vague enough to be satisfying. To Tanya Byrne: thank you, for giving us hope.

This is very much a five star book, and it makes my heart sing to see how amazing YA literature can be.

Afterlove is brilliant. It's so different to what I expected, not I had any concrete expectations. This is sort of a mix between a beautiful YA love story and Buffy/Channel 4's Crazyhead. It's funny, sweet and quite sad, and I don't know that I've read anything like it.

Afterlove is a stunning book. The story is very much told in 2 parts and each half is quite different from each other. The story follows Ash Persaud, a newly out south asian lesbian. Shes kind of goth-ish, quiet and intelligent and a really lovable character. On a school trip to a wind farm, she meets and immediately falls for Poppy Morgan, a whirlwind of confidence, colour and everything Ash is looking for. They immediately fall head over heels with each other, and following their dates and adventures was really relatable and heart warming. Poppy is the kind of girl I wished I was in high school/is the kind of girl I wanted to date in high school but Ash was who I was.

Then everything changes. When Ash is killed in a freak car accident on New Years Eve, she wakes up to become a teen reaper, in charge of reaping people just like here who died in freak accidents. Ash gets used to her new life without her family, with her new reaper friends, but she always clings to the memories of Poppy. All she wants to do is see Poppy again. But, according to the reaper rules, the only time Poppy will be able to Ash is when she is about to die, which obviously Ash wants to avoid.

Ultimately the story is a love story about Ash and Poppy, and their need to see each other one more time. Afterlove deals with grief and loss in the most beautiful way, its a stunning book with brilliant characters and it is full of such hope.

What a fantastic sapphic romance with a gripping speculative twist. This book made me laugh out loud in the first half, and bawl uncontrollably in the second.

Reading from Ash's perspective was a dream. Her voice was so vulnerable and inquisitive which made the plot so much more rich and the characters absolutely luminous. Ash and Poppy's back and forth was so candid, so tangible that they felt completely real to me. While at times tooth-achingly sweet, the young lesbian relationship in this novel was really healthy and so lovely to read, especially from Ash's adoring point of view.

The best thing about the writing was definitely how sneakily the author managed to connect me so deeply with every single character; they were all fully developed with motives and stakes of their own and I cared so much for all of them. I also loved the Brighton setting, the descriptions of the town were so vibrant and an integral part of the great atmosphere of the novel.

The second half of the book introduced a speculative twist which (in the end) I thought was executed perfectly. At first, the new 'rules' of the plot were confusing and felt very vague, but as I read on I realised that the reason I was confused is because Ash was confused too. Her world turns upside down overnight and that's how we're supposed to feel while reading her experience. The naive clarity of the first part of the novel was juxtaposed with the grounding ambiguity she faces in the afterlife and it was beautifully done.

I picked this book up because of the stunning cover, the intriguing plot and the promise of a sapphic romance. What I got was a plot as rich and gripping as a thriller, while being soft and gentle and lovely to consume. I got a wonderful romance and characters I would step on lego for. I got an unforgettable and unique story that I can't wait to recommend to EVERYONE.

Thank you so much to the publisher for this e-ARC!!

Afterlove is a gorgeously-written paranormal(ish) romance(is) YA novel. I say “ish” because it’s sort of both of these things but also not. It blends aspects of each very successfully to come up with something wholly in its own class.

In the book, we follow Ash as she meets and falls in love with Poppy. But then the unthinkable happens and Ash wakes up, neither quite dead nor quite alive, but in between. A reaper, tasked with escorting the souls of the dead to the afterlife.

The first thing I noticed about this book was how brilliant the writing was. It’s that kind of writing that can rip you apart with only a few words, so obviously I was predisposed to love it. And that writing made it very easy just to slip into the story and wait for it to break my heart.

Which it duly did! Not quite as early on as I thought, admittedly, though I guess it’s a hard one to balance. You want to have your readers believe in the relationship between Ash and Poppy, which means you need to develop it. But the crux of the story is in Ash’s death and her subsequent desire to see Poppy again one last time.

It made the pacing a little odd, to be honest. It felt like it was going pretty slowly up until Ash’s death, but at the same time Ash and Poppy’s relationship was developing very rapidly. The contrast between the two is what made the pacing seem strange to me. Maybe though, I was more atuned to that because I was expecting the book to almost open with Ash’s death, and not for it to be the halfway mark or so. (Also at one point, I was surprised that the book had only progressed by two weeks, when it felt like a lot longer. But I think, like I said, the pacing was a product of the story.)

But that didn’t affect my liking of the story so much, thankfully. I was still fully invested throughout and desperately hoping that the foretold ending would actually somehow be subverted.

And I maybe sort of teared up a bit at the end.

(Seriously, can we get like a short story sequel thing? I just wanna know how they’re doing!)

I have been waiting for a new Tanya Byrne book for ages!!! I am so glad this one has come along, and I am sooooo happy I got the chance to read this.
WOW! WOW! WOW!

I was gripped from the opening chapter!!! I absolutely adored this book. I don't remember the last time I felt so hooked on a book. I read it all in one sitting, and genuinely didn't want to put it down.

I have a huge fascination with the afterlife, and I am very spiritual anyway, and so this book ticked all my boxes. I loved how the book felt like it was in two parts. Before the accident, and after the accident. The books premise reminded me a lot of the film 'Ghost' (which I am huge fan of btw) however it is like the film, and so much more!! You would be fooled into thinking its a story that has been told before, however it felt incredibly current and original.

I really enjoyed the central characters of the love story, but I would have liked to have known a little more about both of them prior to the accident - but that's only because I was loving the book so much I just wanted to get more out of it.
I like the fact it was a LGBTQ+ relationship but it didn't feel like that was the main 'point' of the story. (I find a lot of the time with a LGBTQ+ YA novel a lot of the book is taken up by the characters 'struggles' with being 'different' and 'coming out' to friends and family.) This book involved a lesbian relationship, but I didn't feel like that was the sole focus of the book, and would have been the same if it had been a straight couple.
I loved the romance, and was enjoying it plodding along happily without any hitches. I knew the 'accident' was coming, because of the intro and the blurb but it was totally blissful before that, and that made the tragedy of the accident even more heartbreaking when it did eventually happen.

This book is heartbreaking, beautiful, heartwarming and just plain brilliant!
I am so so grateful that I got the chance to read an advanced copy of this book - I will definitely read this book again, and will be recommending to others.

If you love a romance book thats a little different - you will 100% love this!!!

A love story that starts so beautifully you know things are going to go wrong. Ash and Poppy are on the beach just before midnight on Nee Year’s Eve when Ash’s mother discovers she’s not ill in bed and summons her home. And that’s when the story turns. We enter a world of (not so grim) reapers who collect the dead and shepherd them down to Charon. Set in a well described Brighton, Afterlove is a fast and breathless read. I was a little troubled by the “two young people being together in death” thing, as I worried that it romanticised that idea. I wish that Poppy had gone on to live a full life and that the getting together happened a long time later. There is, however, the most beautiful description of a full life that is nothing if not life affirming.

I really loved the idea of this and the concept of the reapers. Ash was great and I loved her relationship with Poppy. I also really liked that Ash was gay and Indian, but the story wasn’t just about these things and they weren’t the only aspects of who she was, which is sadly too rare in YA books.

Afterlove is an unconventional YA love story about not being separated by death. When Ash Persaud falls in love with Poppy, the girl she met on a school trip to the local wind farm, it seems the world has opened up for them, but then Ash dies not long afterwards. However, Ash doesn't leave Brighton, but instead is called upon to join a team of local reapers, pointing souls towards their journey to whatever comes afterwards. Ash is desperate to see Poppy again, but it's not so easy when one of them is dead and the other alive.

This is a fresh novel that shows a whirlwind romance and then a story that takes a very different approach to teenage love and loss, focusing on the afterlife, fighting for someone, and what really matters. The book really comes in two parts, and they are notably different: the 'before' section focuses on Ash, on her relationships with those in her life, and her falling in love with Poppy, and then the 'after' section is more about the rules of being a reaper and Ash and Poppy getting to see each other again. Ash and Poppy's story starts as a fun first love tale after Ash's repeated disappointments with other girls she'd met (it's great to see her supportive best friend looking out for her) and then becomes something different, with higher stakes but still whirlwind emotions. It's cute, but also when you step back from the story an interesting look at relationships and youthful love and how you view the future.

Afterlove combines a contemporary lesbian love story with an afterlife plotline and a Brighton setting to make a quirky book that a lot of readers will enjoy. The characters, including Ash's new reaper friends and those from her 'life', are vivid and interesting, though due to the narrative format it did feel a shame to no longer see into the lives of the latter supporting characters later in the book. There's a fair amount of YA that features death in similar and different ways, but this one handles it in a quirky way that gives it a romcom feel without lessening the reaper/afterlife element.

After seeing the cover reveal on Twitter, I just HAD to read Tanya's novel. Her characters are sassy, spunky and tangible and her love story had me screaming at the page. 10/10