A group of lifetime friends gather together to confront life, love, and now mortality
Everything you want a novel about life, death, and friendship to besmart, moving, sweeping, poetic, stinging, just beautiful. I loved these women (and their men) and this elegy to their long-reaching bonds.
Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage
Before Everything is a celebration of friendship and love between a group of women who have known each another since they were girls. Theyve faced everything together, from youthful sprees and scrapes to mid-life turning points. Now, as Anna, the groups trailblazer and brightest spark, enters hospice, they gather to do what theyve always donetalk and laugh and help each other make choices and plans, this time in Annas rural Massachusetts home. Helen, Annas best friend and a celebrated painter, is about to remarry. The others face their own challengesCaroline with her sisters mental health crisis; Molly with a teenage daughters rebellion; Ming with her law practicedilemmas with kids and work and love.
Before Everything is as funny as it is bittersweet, as the friends revel in the hilarious mistakes theyve seen one another through, the secrets kept, and adventures shared. But now all sense of time has shifted, and the pattern of their lives together takes on new meaning. The novel offers a brilliant, emotionally charged portrait, deftly conveying the sweep of time over everyday lives, and showing how even in difficult endings, gifts can unfold. Above all it is an ode to friendship, and to how one person shapes the journeys of those around her.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Everything you want a novel about life, death, and friendship to besmart, moving, sweeping, poetic, stinging, just beautiful. I loved these women (and their men) and this elegy to their long-reaching bonds.
Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage
Before Everything is a celebration of friendship and love between a group of women who have known each another since they were girls. Theyve faced everything together, from youthful sprees and scrapes to mid-life turning points. Now, as Anna, the groups trailblazer and brightest spark, enters hospice, they gather to do what theyve always donetalk and laugh and help each other make choices and plans, this time in Annas rural Massachusetts home. Helen, Annas best friend and a celebrated painter, is about to remarry. The others face their own challengesCaroline with her sisters mental health crisis; Molly with a teenage daughters rebellion; Ming with her law practicedilemmas with kids and work and love.
Before Everything is as funny as it is bittersweet, as the friends revel in the hilarious mistakes theyve seen one another through, the secrets kept, and adventures shared. But now all sense of time has shifted, and the pattern of their lives together takes on new meaning. The novel offers a brilliant, emotionally charged portrait, deftly conveying the sweep of time over everyday lives, and showing how even in difficult endings, gifts can unfold. Above all it is an ode to friendship, and to how one person shapes the journeys of those around her.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"I admire Victoria Redel's work for so many reasons-for its fearlessness, its complexity, its beauty-and Before Everything is one of the most brilliant, radiant, and heartbreaking books I've read in years. Redel's characters-fierce and funny, loyal and compassionate-feel as real and beloved as the people we hold dearest in our own lives. An extraordinary novel by one of the best writers we have." - Molly Antopol
"Gorgeous, a heartbreaker, a non-stop dazzler, a major achievement." - Michael Cunningham
"At once tough and tender, funny and sad, this beautifully written novel articulates the dynamic realities of those wondrous friendships that last a lifetime." - Siri Hustvedt
"Before Everything is a riveting, timely story that explores the unsettlingly beautiful, emotionally charged landscape that is revealed when old friends embrace what they have never before admitted: the limits of mortality and the boundlessness of friendship." - Ruth Ozeki
"Victoria Redel bears witness to a remarkable group of women, effortlessly weaving back and forth through time, each thread revealing the cracks and secrets of their complex lives, while also drawing them closer. . . . Redel proves that female friendship is the quiet, steady engine that truly runs the world." - Hannah Tinti
"Gorgeous, a heartbreaker, a non-stop dazzler, a major achievement." - Michael Cunningham
"At once tough and tender, funny and sad, this beautifully written novel articulates the dynamic realities of those wondrous friendships that last a lifetime." - Siri Hustvedt
"Before Everything is a riveting, timely story that explores the unsettlingly beautiful, emotionally charged landscape that is revealed when old friends embrace what they have never before admitted: the limits of mortality and the boundlessness of friendship." - Ruth Ozeki
"Victoria Redel bears witness to a remarkable group of women, effortlessly weaving back and forth through time, each thread revealing the cracks and secrets of their complex lives, while also drawing them closer. . . . Redel proves that female friendship is the quiet, steady engine that truly runs the world." - Hannah Tinti
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