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A group of lifetime friends gather together to confront life, love, and now mortality.
Before Everything is a celebration of friendship and love between a group of women who have known each another since they were girls. They've faced everything together, from youthful sprees and scrapes to mid-life turning points. Now, as Anna, the group's trailblazer and brightest spark, enters hospice, they gather to do what they've always done - talk and laugh and help each other make choices and plans, this time in Anna's rural Massachusetts home. Helen, Anna's best friend and a celebrated painter, is about to remarry. The others face their own challenges - Caroline with her sister's mental health crisis; Molly with a teenage daughter's rebellion; Ming with her law practice - dilemmas with kids and work and love.
Before Everything is as funny as it is bittersweet, as the friends revel in the hilarious mistakes they've seen each another through, the secrets kept, and adventures shared. But now all sense of time has shifted, and the pattern of their lives together takes on new meaning. The novel offers a brilliant, emotionally charged portrait, deftly conveying the sweep of time over everyday lives, and showing how even in difficult endings, gifts can unfold. Above all it is an ode to friendship, and to how one person shapes the journeys of those around her.
"Starred Review. Redel has crafted a lyrical ode to female friendship, proving that bonds can somehow be made of iron and elastic, sometimes strong and sometimes frail ... Fans of Anne Tyler and Jennifer Close will adore this warmhearted and clear-eyed novel." - Booklist
"Jumping through multiple perspectives and time periods is confusing at times, but the plot and tone portray the hardship of illness realistically. This complicated novel of friendship is not for everyone. Fans of Jodi Picoult may find it appealing." - Library Journal
"Though Redel has chosen a difficult topic, too often she opts for "a-w-w" moments rather than unflinching confrontations." - Kirkus
"A touching story of friendship and loss ... richly realized. The result is an unflinching and affecting look at how one woman's final days change the lives of those around her." - Publishers Weekly
"Gorgeous, a heartbreaker, a non-stop dazzler, a major achievement. Thank you, Victoria Redel." - Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hours
"Redel proves that female friendship is the quiet, steady engine that truly runs the world." - Hannah Tinti, author of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
"Before Everything is a riveting, timely story that explores the unsettlingly beautiful, emotionally charged landscape that is revealed when old friends embrace what they have never before admitted: the limits of mortality and the boundlessness of friendship." - Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being
"At once tough and tender, funny and sad, this beautifully written novel articulates the dynamic realities of those wondrous friendships that last a lifetime." - Siri Hustvedt, author of The Blazing World
"Redel's characters - fierce and funny, loyal and compassionate - feel as real and beloved as the people we hold dearest in our own lives. An extraordinary novel by one of the best writers we have." - Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
"Everything you want a novel about life, death, and friendship to be - smart, moving, sweeping, poetic, stinging, just beautiful. I loved these women (and their men) and this elegy to their long-reaching bonds." - Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage
This information about Before Everything 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.
Victoria Redel is the critically acclaimed author of four previous works of fiction and three collections of poetry. Her debut novel, Loverboy, was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and won the Sister Mariella Gable Prize from Graywolf Press and the Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has contributed to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, O, the Oprah Magazine, Granta, One Story, and the Harvard Review. She received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
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