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    The Reappearance of Strawberries: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    The Reappearance of Strawberries: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    The Reappearance of Strawberries: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook27 pages16 minutes

    The Reappearance of Strawberries: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

    By Simon Van Booy

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    About this ebook

    The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of intensity and atmosphere. Love, loss, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

    Included in this updated P.S. edition is the new story "The Mute Ventriloquist."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 23, 2010
    ISBN9780062001986
    The Reappearance of Strawberries: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Author

    Simon Van Booy

    Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

    Read more from Simon Van Booy

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      Book preview

      The Reappearance of Strawberries - Simon Van Booy

      The Reappearance of Strawberries

      A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

      Simon Van Booy

      Dedication

      To Maddie

      Contents

      Dedication

      The Reappearance of Strawberries

      Acknowledgments

      An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius

      About the Author

      Praise

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      THE REAPPEARANCE OF STRAWBERRIES

      Eight stories above the infamous rue de Vaugirard, the man in the ninth bed of the Bonnard Hospital ward had requested nothing but strawberries for several days. For most of that Tuesday afternoon all that could be heard were the tiny hands and feet of rain against the window.

      While most of the patients disappeared into a medicated sleep, Pierre-Yves lay awake, aware that he was dying. Beside his bed was a bowl of strawberries that he was unable to reach out and touch. Whenever he imagined their sweetness, he remembered her and shuddered. They were piled up in a heavy yellow bowl.

      Pierre-Yves breathed deeply in an attempt to bury the scent in his lungs, while outside on the street below he imagined taxis, filled with cigarette smoke, lunging between traffic lights. During his first night in the hospital, after falling over in a square populated by hundreds of pigeons, a memory brushed against him.

      As light visits an attic through a

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