Hello Beautiful
The poignant and uplifting New York Times bestselling family saga
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4.3 • 97 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • BARACK OBAMA SUMMER READ • MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD!
‘BEAUTIFUL, PERCEPTIVE, WISTFUL’ Miranda Cowley Heller
‘ANN NAPOLITANO’S WRITING IS ASTONISHING’ Marian Keyes
‘RADIANT AND BRILLIANTLY CRAFTED’ New York Times
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Best friends and sisters, the four Padavano girls bring loving chaos to their close-knit Italian American neighbourhood. William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So, when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano, it's as if the world has lit up around him.
With Julia comes her family: Sylvie, the family's dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is a free-spirited artist; and Emeline patiently takes care of them all. But when darkness from William's past begins to block the light of his future, it is Sylvie, not Julia, who becomes his closest confidante. The result is a catastrophic rift that leaves the family inhabiting two sides of a fault line.
Can they find their way back to each other? Can love make a broken family whole?
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‘A luminously beautiful novel’ Observer
‘I very nearly missed my stop on the train. It was that good’ Elle
‘A novel of rare yet classic beauty’ i Paper
‘A moving, tender family epic’ Pandora Sykes
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ann Napolitano’s tenderhearted family drama is an exquisite and absorbing read. College student William Waters, who used a basketball scholarship to escape his cold, emotionally neglectful home, falls in love with his spunky classmate Julia Padavano. Soon, William’s drawn into Julia’s close-knit band of sisters: independent Sylvie, creative Cecelia, and nurturing Emeline. Loosely inspired by Little Women, Hello Beautiful opens in the late ’70s and spans the next 30 years, giving us an incredible view of how our most treasured relationships can be tested by our personal choices. As heartbreaking events challenge the Padavano clan’s core belief that family love can overcome anything, we found ourselves reading and reading to find out how these wonderful characters’ lives would pan out.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Napolitano (Dear Edward) explores the meaning of love and family with this striking story of four Chicago sisters and the young man who enters their lives. William Waters, a basketball player from outside Boston, enrolls at Northwestern in 1978 on an athletic scholarship. After he starts dating fellow student Julia Padavano, he's embraced by Julia's three younger sisters—Sylvie, a romantic searching for a great love affair; Cecelia, an aspiring artist; and Cecelia's earnest and quiet twin, Emeline—and is delighted to find a loving and loud family so different from his own, his parents having grown taciturn after his older sister's death years before. William and Julia marry, while the unmarried Cecelia gets pregnant at 17, Sylvie presses on with a job at a library, and Emeline works at a daycare where she fosters a crush on a coworker. After one character attempts suicide, the bonds of the expanding family are tested, and the Padavano women reexamine the limits of how much they're willing to sacrifice. The author breathes great life into her characters, and brings insight into their quiet moments as they gradually come into their own. This will move readers.
Customer Reviews
A theatre of ways
I must have gone in and out of this book a dozen of times. I admire the versatility of the author to build a story with so many characters and hopping from one to the other through details, memories, locations, feelings and interior moments. But because I am not used to this kind of narrative, sometime I found myself asking:where was I? It is apparent how personal and natural this way of expressing all of those moments who build a story is. A real life rollercoaster.
Started slow
It was a slow burner but could put down from the final 1/3