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Rebecca is young, lost, and beautiful. A gifted artist, she seeks solace and inspiration in the Mediterranean heat of Athens - trying to understand who she is and how she can love without fear.
George has come to Athens to learn ancient languages after growing up in New England boarding schools and Ivy League colleges. He has no close relationships with anyone and spends his days hunched over books or wandering the city in a drunken stupor.
Henry is in Athens to dig. An accomplished young archaeologist, he devotedly uncovers the city's past as a way to escape his own, which holds a secret that not even his doting parents can talk about.
...And then, with a series of chance meetings, Rebecca, George, and Henry are suddenly in flight, their lives brighter and clearer than ever, as they fall headlong into a summer that will forever define them in the decades to come.
"The rhythms of Henry's tender, damaged heart propel the narrative, and Van Booy wisely resists romanticizing torment, instead suggesting that grief - tied as it is to fate and faith - can give way to promise." - Publishers Weekly
"If F. Scott Fitzgerald and Marguerite Duras had had a son, he would be Simon Van Booy; this is a truly special writer who does things with abstract language that is so evocative and original your breath literally catches in your chest. This is a novel you simply must read!" - Andre Dubus III, New York Times bestselling author of Townie
"Everything Beautiful Began After both creates and satisfies a feeling of wanderlust. Van Booy's confident prose carries the reader over oceans and back again, into archaeological digs and airport hotels, and the romance at the center of the book stays vivid long after the story is through." - Emma Straub, author of Other People We Married
"Already a new-generation master of the short story, Simon Van Booy has now emerged as a newly minted master of the novel as well…. Van Booy is a writer whose work I will forever eagerly read." - Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain
This information about Everything Beautiful Began After was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Ken Browar
Simon Van Booy is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than a dozen books for adults and children, including The Illusion of Separateness and The Presence of Absence. Simon is the editor of three volumes of philosophy and has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, and the BBC. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. Raised in rural North Wales, he currently lives in New York where he is also a book editor and a volunteer E.M.T. crew chief.
Link to Simon Van Booy's Website
Name Pronunciation
Simon Van Booy: van boo-ee
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