Simon Van Booy & Molly Peacock

The first novel from the Frank O'Connor Award-winning author Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After is a beautifully rendered novel set against the backdrop of Athens – a story of love, tragedy and redemption amongst the ruins of Ancient Greece.

Mary Delany was seventy-two years old when she noticed a petal drop from a geranium. In a flash of inspiration, she picked up her scissors and cut out a paper replica of the petal, inventing the art of collage. It was the summer of 1772, in England. During the next ten years she completed nearly a thousand cut-paper botanicals (which she called mosaicks) so accurate that botanists still refer to them. Poet-biographer Molly Peacock uses close-ups of these brilliant collages in The Paper Garden to track the extraordinary life of Delany, friend of Swift, Handel, Hogarth, and even Queen Charlotte and King George III.