Everything Beautiful Began After
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...
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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.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780061661488 (0061661481)
Publish date: July 5th 2011
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pages no: 402
Edition language: English
Category:
Literature,
Cultural,
Book Club,
Adult Fiction,
Realistic Fiction,
Romance,
Literary Fiction,
Adult,
Art,
Contemporary,
Greece
This is Van Booy's first novel after two excellent short story collections. While it starts strong, a daring change in the plot (no spoilers here!) fails to carry the momentum and the books disintegrates about 3/4 of the way through. Van Booy is a rare writer who seems to have hope for humanity, des...
This book had two rare distinctions for me: 1. only fiction book in which I highlighted lots passages that really struck me; 2. only book I have disliked in the middle only to find out that all the uncomfortable stuff was necessary to a good ending.The book begins a little like a French novel, or Tr...
Another staggeringly delicious read, another review where I'm fumbling for the words to express how much I loved this book.In terms of plot, there's not much, technically: three young ex-pats meet in Athens, each hiding from a secret, hungry to loved. At the start, I was briefly apprehensive this w...