All the World Beside
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“A heart-wrenching story of love, family, and spirituality.” —People Magazine
From the New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the love story between two men in Puritan New England.
Cana, Massachusetts: a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister’s words a love so captivating it transcends language.
As the bond between these two men grows more and more passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments which threaten to destroy them in this world and the next. And when the religious ecstasies of the Great Awakening begin to take hold, igniting a new era of zealotry, Nathaniel and Arthur search for a path out of an impossible situation, imagining a future for themselves which has no name. Their wives and children must do the same, looking beyond the known world for a new kind of wilderness, both physical and spiritual.
Set during the turbulent historical upheavals which shaped America’s destiny and following in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, All the World Beside reveals the very human lives just beneath the surface of dogmatic belief. Bestselling author Garrard Conley has created a page-turning, vividly imagined historical tale that is both a love story and a crucible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Conley turns from the homophobic Baptist upbringing of his memoir Boy Erased to 1730 Massachusetts for a finely tuned debut novel about a queer love affair between a reverend and a doctor. Rev. Nathaniel Whitfield bonds with his parishioner Arthur Lyman when the latter treats Nathaniel's frail younger child Ezekiel for an unknown illness. While the forbidden love story of the two men is at the core of the narrative, its scope and depth comes from the empathic and complex treatment of the other family members, including Nathaniel's daughter, Sarah, who in 1765 receives letters from Ezekiel referencing an estrangement between the siblings that he seeks to heal. Conley's prose is slightly formal but also direct and rhythmic, as in the opening lines, written from a young Ezekiel's perspective: "The shore of his mother, her warmth sheltering his infant body from the cold. The shore of his sister, pressing her nose on his." An author's note on Conley's research into 18th-century clandestine gay life offers welcome context to Nathaniel and Arthur's bewilderment and guilt over their undeniable love. This is a potent chronicle of an underexplored era in queer history.
