The Presence of Absence. Este artículo no está disponible.The Presence of Absence

“Flows with depth and power....wide-open wonder.”―Washington Post

“Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable....wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.”―San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the Year

As a writer lies dying, he has one last story to tell: a tale of faith and devotion, a meditation on what lies beyond this life, and a prayer of gratitude that may lead to rebirth. This is Simon Van Booy at his visionary best.

“Language is a map leading to a place not on the map,” announces a young writer lying in a hospital bed at the beginning of The Presence of Absence. As he contemplates his impending physical disappearance and the impact on his beloved wife, he realizes, “Life doesn’t start when you’re born . . . it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to another person.”

Infused with poetic clarity and graced with humor, Simon Van Booy’s innovative novella asks the reader to find beauty―even gratitude―in the cycle of birth and death. Stripped of artifice, The Presence of Absence is a meditation between the writer and the reader, an imaginative work that challenges the deceit of written words and explores our strongest emotions.

Simon Van Booy is not only a master storyteller but a writer whose fiction is rich with philosophical insights into things both mapped and undiscovered. The Presence of Absence parts the darkness to reveal what has been just out of sight all along.

Simon Van Booy is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than a dozen books for adults and children, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Sipsworth. He is the anthologist of three volumes of philosophy and has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, and the BBC. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. Raised in rural North Wales, he currently lives in New York where he is also a book editor and a volunteer E.M.T. crew chief.