Aftermath

By: Katharine Quarmby

Narrated by: Serena Gay

Length: 38 mins

Publisher's summary

A journalist is haunted by the ghost of a story - and a woman - she can't leave behind. A story so powerful that it haunts the dreams and waking hours of all that have lived through it. A genocide in which the West failed to save the innocent. This is the story of aftermath - of how the dead we fail, haunt us - and how we must return, to lay their ghosts and set ourselves free.

Katharine Quarmby is a writer, journalist, and film-maker. Her latest book is No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers (One World Publications, 2013). Her first Kindle Single, Blood and Water, was also published this year (Thistle, 2013). In 1997 she travelled with reporter Fergal Keane and BBC Panorama to Rwanda, two years after the genocide, working as assistant producer on the Bafta award-winning Valentina's Story. She returned with Fergal Keane to produce two prize-winning films with BBC Newsnight in 1999. Since then she has worked both in TV and in print journalism, as a correspondent for The Economist, as well as contributing to British broadsheets, including the Guardian and Sunday Times. This is her first short story.

©2013 Katharine Quarmby (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Almost Too Haunting to Bear 😭

This thirty-eight minute short audio is so gut wrenching that I could hardly bear to listen to it . . . or STOP listening to it. The absolute horror of what human beings do to one another and how they justify it is the most sickening thing imaginable. And any reporter or camera person who has the guts to even attempt to capture that kind of genocide is to be commended . . . I think . . . or to be pitied, I'm not sure which. I don't know how one can put their life back together after even one incidence of reporting on these war stories, much less multiple. We have two sons who are war veterans and suffer from PTSD. They will never be the same. Yet, I don't think that either of them have witnessed the extreme deprivation and horror that is described in this short clip. God help those who have walked these bloody fields. 😰

Shockingly realistic

I identify with this story, as someone who was a refugee for a whole year & someone who has experienced civil crisis, where innocent persons were killed by their neighbors, in the Shari'a crisis in Kaduna Nigeria (Feb 2000).