The Secret Lives of People in Love

Bol Partner

“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.

Bol

Since the publication of his critically acclaimed debut collection The Secret Lives of People in Love, Simon Van Booy has been hailed as one of the most exciting and talented short-story writers in Anglo-American fiction. This magnificent collection brings together twenty-four stories by a writer of unparalleled lyricism, generosity and emotional power. Set in a range of locations, from Cornwall, Wales, and New York to Paris and Rome, these stark and beautiful stories are a perfect synthesis of intensity and atmosphere. Love, loss, isolation and the power of memory are Van Booy's themes, and in spare, economical 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.