Beautiful and enchanting--Washington Post

Sometimes a second chance comes in the most unexpected way....

Following the loss of her husband and son, Helen Cartwright returns to the village of her childhood after living abroad for six decades. Her only wish is to die quickly and without fuss. She retreats into her home on Westminster Crescent, becoming a creature of routine and habit: Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle--as though even for death there is a queue.

Then, one cold winter night, a chance encounter with a mouse sets Helen on a surprising journey. Over the course of two weeks in a small English town, this reclusive widow discovers an unexpected reason to live.

Sipsworth is a reminder that there is always reason for hope. No matter what we have planned for ourselves, sometimes life has plans of its own. With profound compassion, Simon Van Booy illuminates not only a deep friendship forged between two lonely creatures, but the reverberations of goodness that ripple out from that unique bond.

Simon Van Booy knows a great deal about the complex longings of the human heart, and he articulates those truths in his stories with pitch-perfect elegance. Love Begins in Winter is a splendid collection, and Van Booy is now a writer on my must-always-read list. -- Robert Olen Butler, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Severance

A new collection of stories from award-winning writer Simon Van Booy that explores the beauty of connection and the anguish of loss.

In Love Begins in Winter, Simon Van Booy offers intimate scenes of tragic loss, redemptive tales of unlikely connection, and breathtaking moments that never really end. These stories, set around the world, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion.

From a famous French cellist who heals the heart of a lost woman to a suitor who polishes eggs, from heroic gypsies to generous gondoliers who can sing, Van Booy writes eloquently about the difficult choices we make in order to maintain our humanity.

Breathtaking. . .chillingly beautiful, like postcards from Eden. . .Van Booy's stories are somehow like paintings the characters walk out of, and keep walking. -- Los Angeles Times

A newly packaged re-issue of Simon Van Booy's critically acclaimed debut collection, THE SECRET LIVES OF PEOPLE IN LOVE.

In The Secret Lives of People in Love, Simon Van Booy explores the sway of fate and power of memory on the lives of lonely and vulnerable people. With the same spare, economical prose that he brought to his subsequent collection, Love Begins in Winter, winner of the 2009 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, Van Booy creates a profoundly humane and somber resonance with the assured hand of a first-rate storyteller (Newsday). The Secret Lives of People in Love announces the arrival of a major voice in fiction.

It is a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book...In Night Came with Many Stars, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common lives fully lived.
--NPR, Books We Love

Not to miss!
--USA Today

In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol's daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy's spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light.

What you give in this world, an old man tells his grandson, will be given back to you. Those words illuminate the actions within this unforgettable novel and its connected characters. A young man survives two nearly fatal accidents. A Black family saves an orphaned white boy. A pregnant teenager is rescued by the side of the road. A teenager with developmental disabilities is given his first job. Each incident grows in meaning and power over many decades as we see connections sometimes felt but not always apparent to the people themselves. Everything was moving, observes Samuel (Carol's grandson) in the Kentucky woods. An invisible force that was everywhere, and made everything touch.

Told by a master storyteller, Night Came with Many Stars is a rare novel that reveals how wondrous, mysterious, and magically connected life can be--the light Simon Van Booy creates illuminates our own lives.

The uncanny beauty of Van Booy's prose, and his ability to knife straight to the depths of a character's heart, fill a reader with wonder. -- San Francisco Chronicle

Award-winning author Simon Van Booy tells a harrowing and enchanting story of how one man's act of mercy during World War II changed the lives of strangers, and how they each discover the astonishing truth of their connection.

The characters in 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.

Flows with depth and power....wide-open wonder.--Washington Post

Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable....wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.--San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the Year

As a writer lies dying, he has one last story to tell: a tale of faith and devotion, a meditation on what lies beyond this life, and a prayer of gratitude that may lead to rebirth. This is Simon Van Booy at his visionary best.

Language is a map leading to a place not on the map, announces a young writer lying in a hospital bed at the beginning of The Presence of Absence. As he contemplates his impending physical disappearance and the impact on his beloved wife, he realizes, Life doesn't start when you're born . . . it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to another person.

Infused with poetic clarity and graced with humor, Simon Van Booy's innovative novella asks the reader to find beauty--even gratitude--in the cycle of birth and death. Stripped of artifice, The Presence of Absence is a meditation between the writer and the reader, an imaginative work that challenges the deceit of written words and explores our strongest emotions.

Simon Van Booy is not only a master storyteller but a writer whose fiction is rich with philosophical insights into things both mapped and undiscovered. The Presence of Absence parts the darkness to reveal what has been just out of sight all along.

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

From Simon Van Booy, the award-winning author of Love Begins in Winter and The Secret Lives of People in Love, comes a debut novel of longing and discovery amidst the ruins of Athens. With echoes of Nicole Krauss's The History of Love and Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love, Van Booy's resonant tale of three isolated, disaffected adults discovering one another in Greece is the compelling product of an inquisitive, visionary talent. In the words of Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Simon Van Booy knows a great deal about the complex longings of the human heart.

Van Booy's great triumph comes in using a family secret to underscore the message that family is as much a choice as a blood tie. Although any reader will find something to love here, someone who has benefited from a perfectly imperfect family will wear the widest smile. This little book with a big heart is suitable not just for Father's Day, but for any day. -- Shelf Awareness

When devastating news shatters the life of six-year-old Harvey, she finds herself in the care of a veteran social worker, Wanda, and alone in the world save for one relative she has never met--a disabled felon, haunted by a violent past he can't escape.

Moving between past and present, Father's Day weaves together the story of Harvey's childhood on Long Island and her life as a young woman in Paris. Written in raw, spare prose that personifies the characters, this novel is the journey of two people searching for a future in the ruin of their past.

Father's Day is a meditation on the quiet, sublime power of compassion, and the beauty of simple, everyday things--a breakthrough work from one of our most gifted chroniclers of the human heart.

It is a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book...In Night Came with Many Stars, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common lives fully lived.
--NPR, Books We Love

Not to miss!
--USA Today

In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol's daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy's spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light.

What you give in this world, an old man tells his grandson, will be given back to you. Those words illuminate the actions within this unforgettable novel and its connected characters. A young man survives two nearly fatal accidents. A Black family saves an orphaned white boy. A pregnant teenager is rescued by the side of the road. A teenager with developmental disabilities is given his first job. Each incident grows in meaning and power over many decades as we see connections sometimes felt but not always apparent to the people themselves. Everything was moving, observes Samuel (Carol's grandson) in the Kentucky woods. An invisible force that was everywhere, and made everything touch.

Told by a master storyteller, Night Came with Many Stars is a rare novel that reveals how wondrous, mysterious, and magically connected life can be--the light Simon Van Booy creates illuminates our own lives.

Provocative and eye-opening, Why We Need Love is one of three slim selections of philosophical texts and excerpts--along with Why We Fight and Why Our Decisions Don't Matter--introduced and contextualized by acclaimed author Simon Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter, The Secret Lives of People in 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.

Provocative and eye-opening, Why Our Decisions Don't Matter is one of three slim selections of philosophical texts and excerpts--along with Why We Need Love and Why We Fight--introduced and contextualized by acclaimed author Simon Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter, The Secret Lives of People in 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 Our Decisions Don't Matter, Simon Van Booy curates an enlightening collection of excerpts, passages, and paintings, presenting works by Homer, Sophocles, Horace, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Voltaire, Blake, Dickinson, Twain, Rilke, Camus, Kerouac, Sartre, Borges, Beckett, and others.

The uncanny beauty of Van Booy's prose, and his ability to knife straight to the depths of a character's heart, fill a reader with wonder. -- San Francisco Chronicle

Award-winning author Simon Van Booy tells a harrowing and enchanting story of how one man's act of mercy during World War II changed the lives of strangers, and how they each discover the astonishing truth of their connection.

The characters in 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.

Provocative and eye-opening, Why We Fight is one of three slim selections of philosophical texts and excerpts--along with Why We Need Love and Why Our Decisions Don't Matter--introduced and contextualized by acclaimed author Simon Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter, The Secret Lives of People in 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 Fight, Simon Van Booy curates an enlightening collection of excerpts, passages, and paintings, presenting works by Sophocles, Tacitus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, William Shakespeare, Emily Brontë, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, James Tissot, James Joyce, General George Patton, and others.

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

In The Illusion of Separateness, award-winning author Simon Van Booy tells a harrowing and enchanting story of how one man's act of mercy during World War II changed the lives of strangers, and how they each discover the astonishing truth of their connection.

Whether they are pursued by Nazi soldiers, old age, shame, deformity, disease, or regret, the characters in this utterly compelling novel discover in 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 an unseen chain.

The Illusion of Separateness intertwines the stories of unique and compelling characters who--through seemingly random acts of selflessness--discover the vital parts they have played in each other's lives.