Before Everything
A Novel
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3.6 • 16 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
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 be—smart, 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. They’ve faced everything together, from youthful sprees and scrapes to mid-life turning points. Now, as Anna, the group’s trailblazer and brightest spark, enters hospice, they gather to do what they’ve always done—talk and laugh and help each other make choices and plans, this time in Anna’s rural Massachusetts home. Helen, Anna’s best friend and a celebrated painter, is about to remarry. The others face their own challenges—Caroline with her sister’s mental health crisis; Molly with a teenage daughter’s rebellion; Ming with her law practice—dilemmas with kids and work and love.
Before Everything is as funny as it is bittersweet, as the friends revel in the hilarious mistakes they’ve 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this touching story of friendship and loss, five very close friends come together to relive a lifetime of memories when a member of their close-knit tribe enters hospice care after a long battle with cancer. Each woman has a resonant relationship with Anna, the dying math teacher and musician who was always the group's most adventurous spirit, but the story of the five women and how they share their lives with each other over decades of friendship is what gives the novel its greatest power. Weaving together a cinematic montage of moments both life-changing and mundane, Redel (Loverboy) paints Anna's life as seen by others: her closest friends, who are always at her side; her husband, from whom she has separated; her brothers, who want her to fight the illness and refuse to accept her decision to enter hospice care; her children, grieving her impending loss even as they embark on exciting lives as young adults; and the many other characters who populate this richly realized novel. The result is an unflinching and affecting look at how one woman's final days change the lives of those around her.
Customer Reviews
Lovely, luminous
Gorgeous prose maps the complex, delicate emotions of a group of friends. I fell so in love with these women that I didn’t want the book to end - although the ending is perfect.