Everything Beautiful Began After: Book summary and reviews of Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy

Everything Beautiful Began After Summary

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.

Everything Beautiful Began After Reviews

"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

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Simon Van Booy Author Biography

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the New York Post. Van Booy is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, now translated into several languages. He lives in New York City, where he teaches part-time at the School of Visual Arts and at Long Island University. He is also involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities Program (REaCH) for young adults living in underserved communities.

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