Simon Van Booy

The Secret Lives of People in Love

The first short story collection by award winning writer Simon Van Booy. The stories, set in NYC, Paris, Rome, Greece and the American South are atmospheric and compassionate. Love, loss, frailty, human contact and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In sweet, toned and measured prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

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.

A Novel

Everything Beautiful Began After

Sipsworth

Love Begins In Winter

A family saga--told in a captivating narrative that leaps forwards and backwards in time--of one family's struggle to survive in the rural United States over 100 years. Carol was thirteen when her daddy lost her in a game of cards. One year later--pregnant and with nowhere to go--she is taken in by Bessie and Martha, who run a secret refuge for "lost women." Fifty years on in the same small Kentucky town, Carol's thirteen-year-old grandson rides his BMX and watches wrestling, mesmerized by 1980s excess, while his community fights to stay employed in factories and on farms. Simon Van Booy has woven the many struggles and small triumphs of three generations of a single Kentucky family into an intimate portrayal of American life that includes the Depression, war, faith, the hardship of women, racial prejudice, and rural disenfranchisement. Van Booy captures the distinctive voices of each generation, time and again revealing the sacred bonds of family and friendship in times of crisis. With stark, poetic clarity, Night Came with Many Stars is a captivating journey through one century that reveals an America rarely seen.

Night Came with Many Stars

A master storyteller’s vision reawakens us to the human experience in this diverse, haunting, and unexpectedly humorous new collection of short fiction from Simon Van Booy—his first since Love Begins in Winter, winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. “She believed it was a gift to never truly know the self. We are not who we think we are, nor how others see us. Long before death, we die a thousand times at the hands of a definition.” In his first book of short stories since Love Begins in Winter, for which he won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award), bestselling author Simon Van Booy offers a collection of stories highlighting how human genius can emerge through acts of compassion. Through characters including an eccentric film director, an aging Cockney bodyguard, the teenage child of Nigerian immigrants, a divorced amateur magician from New Jersey, and a Beijing street vendor who becomes an overnight billionaire, Tales of Accidental Genius contemplates individuals from different cultures, races—rich and poor, young and old—and reveals how faith and yearning for connection helps us all transcend darkness of fear and misfortune.

Stories

Tales of Accidental Genius

An exquisite new collection of short stories from award-winning author Simon Van Booy. Over the past decade, Simon Van Booy has been listening to people’s stories. With these personal accounts as a starting point, he has crafted a powerful collection of short fiction that takes readers into the innermost lives of everyday people. From a family saved from ruin by a mysterious benefactor, to a downtrodden boxer who shows unexpected kindness to a mugger, these masterfully written tales reveal not only the precarious balance maintained between grief and happiness in our lives, but also how the echoes of personal tragedy can shape us for the better. “Van Booy’s stories are somehow like paintings the characters walk out of, and keep walking.” —Los Angeles Times "Simon Van Booy knows a great deal about the complex longings of the human heart." --Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

The Sadness of Beautiful Things

A collection of short works by the award-winning author of The Secret Lives of People in Love explores the beauty of connection and the anguish of loss, from the tale of a famous French cellist who heals the heart of a lost woman to a suitor who polishes eggs.

Five Stories

Love Begins in Winter

On the verge of giving up—anchored to dreams that never came true and to people who have long since disappeared from their lives—Van Booy's characters walk the streets of these stark and beautiful stories until chance meetings with strangers force them to face responsibility for lives they thought had continued on without them.

The Coming and Going of Strangers

Vital insights and wisdom on the perennial question of why we need love This book explores how some of the greatest minds of civilization have tackled a question that continues to play a vital part in our lives today. In Why We Need Love, Simon Van Booy curates an enlightening collection of excerpts, passages, and paintings, presenting works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, O. Henry, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, AnaÏs Nin, Marc Chagall, J. Krishnamurti, and others. Why We Need Love will engage both the serious philosopher and the eternally curious.

Why We Need Love

Award-winning author Simon Van Booy introduces readers to a magical, whimsical world, perfect for fans of Circus Mirandus and Serafina and the Black Cloak. When twelve-year-old Gertie Milk washes up on the island of Skuldark, she finds that all of her memories are gone. Home to helpful Slug Lamps, delicious moonberries, and a ferocious Guard Worm, the island is full of oddities, including a cozy cottage containing artifacts from every corner of history. It is there that Gertie discovers she has been chosen as the next Keeper of Lost Things, tasked with the mission of returning objects to history’s most important figures right when they need them most. With the help of a time machine disguised as a vintage sports car and the guidance of her fellow Keeper, Kolt, Gertie dodges an elephant army in ancient Alexandria, crashes a 1920s flapper party, and battles a ruthless Zhou Dynasty king. But soon, Gertie encounters an enemy that threatens everything the Keepers stand for: The Losers, villains who don't want to keep order but destroy it. Now, Gertie must uncover the truth of her own past if she wants to stop the Losers and set history back in place.

Gertie Milk and the Keeper of Lost Things

Presence of Absence

Weaves together the story of Harvey's childhood with her Uncle Jason, a disabled felon who took her in after her parents died, and as a young woman in Paris as she awaits his arrival for a Father's Day visit.

Harvey's life was shattered at the age of six, when she found herself in the care of a veteran social worker, and alone in the world save for an uncle she had never met-- Jason, a disabled felon, haunted by a violent past he can't escape. As a young woman in Paris, Harley looks back on her childhood on Long Island, and remember how she and Jason searched for a future in the ruin of their pasts.

a novel

Father's day

City of Windy Trees

The Missing Statues

Всичко красиво започна после

Yanılsamalar Atlası

The characters in Simon Van Booy's The Illusion of Separateness discover at their darkest moments of fear and isolation that they are not alone, that they were never alone, that every human being is a link in a chain we cannot see. This gripping novel—inspired by true events—tells the interwoven stories of a deformed German infantryman; a lonely British film director; a young, blind museum curator; two Jewish American newlyweds separated by war; and a caretaker at a retirement home for actors in Santa Monica. They move through the same world but fail to perceive their connections until, through seemingly random acts of selflessness, a veil is lifted to reveal the vital parts they have played in one another's lives, and the illusion of their separateness.

Simon Van Booy

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