Everything Beautiful Began After

Young, beautiful, and lost, Rebecca has come to Athens to abandon herself to the city’s strangeness and heat on a campaign to learn about love. Deserted by her mother and brought up by her grandfather in the south of France, she has never had an anchor to keep her from feeling constantly adrift.

George has come to Athens to translate. It’s all he knows how to do. Dropped off at a New England boarding school when he was a child, his closest friends are Aristophanes and Jack Daniels, Euripides and Jim Beam.

Henry has come to Athens to dig. An archaeologist, he spends his days on-site in Athens, and roams the Agora on the weekends. Henry comes from a happy, humdrum Welsh family. Nothing has really ever happened to him.

After a chance meeting on a hot Athens day, however, and George and Rebecca begin a conversation…that turns into drinks…then a few dinners...

Until Rebecca meets Henry.
And Henry meets George.
And Athens changes their lives forever.
 
 
 
 

Commended for Indies Choice Book Awards (Fiction) 2012

“"Vivid and meticulous...the floweriness of his prose is skillfully balanced by his short, precise sentences. Intriguing."”

"A swift and engaging story..." -- Wall Street Journal

"His prose is music, and his characters are warmhearted, gentle, bemused, philosophical beings....It's as if Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 30 has unfolded into a full-blown novel." -- Austin Ratner, The East Hampton Star

"Van Booy's writing rings with the proverbial pithiness of Oscar Wilde, the elegance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the clarity of Graham Greene and the wit of Evelyn Waugh, conjuring a strong voice full of poetic, timeless grace of which much of the contemporary literary scene is starved." -- San Francisco Examiner

"Van Booy's writing seduces from the first page....He is a hugely gifted writer. More vitally, he has something to say." -- Portland Press Herald

"There is...an integrity to [Van Booy's] vision and a haunting element in his portrait of friendship and, ultimately, resolution." -- Daily Mail (London)

"[T]he exquisite prose and heartbreaking (but never hopeless) emotional honesty make it a worthy read." -- Daily Candy

-- Metro (London)

"Atmospheric and anchored in its place. A book that is timeless but not rootless. Everything Beautiful Began After is highly sophisticated and absolutely sincere." -- Irish Times

"How lovely to encounter a grownup romantic in Simon Van Booy....[He] is a lovely writer, and Everything Beautiful Began After is a kind book." -- Open Letters Monthly

"Beautifully written, touchingly told, Van Booy radiates pain, fears, love and freedom on every page of this book." -- Passport

"A tender, earnest first novel....Van Booy wisely resists romanticizing torment, instead suggesting that grief -- tied as it is to fate and faith -- can give awy 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

"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

"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

Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

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.

"Apowerful meditation on the undying nature of love and the often cruel beauty ofone's own fate. This is a novel you simply must read!" -Andre Dubus III, New York Times bestselling author of Townie FromSimon Van Booy, the award-winning author of

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