Critical Praise

"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. Yet he is also an earthy realist who can tell a story that pulls us along like a speeding taxi in a far-off country. These admirable qualities and more come to bear beautifully in this debut novel that does not read like a debut novel; Everything Beautiful Began After is a powerful meditation on the undying nature of love and the often cruel beauty of one’s own fate. 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, with Everything Beautiful Began After, as a newly minted master of the novel as well. Achingly beautiful, this book illuminates the need in us all for true connection in a life that often renders itself in fragments and artifacts and small bursts of color. 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

"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