Publishers Weekly
01/29/2024
Conley turns from the homophobic Baptist upbringing of his memoir Boy Erased to 1730 Massachusetts for a finely tuned debut novel about a queer love affair between a reverend and a doctor. Rev. Nathaniel Whitfield bonds with his parishioner Arthur Lyman when the latter treats Nathaniel’s frail younger child Ezekiel for an unknown illness. While the forbidden love story of the two men is at the core of the narrative, its scope and depth comes from the empathic and complex treatment of the other family members, including Nathaniel’s daughter, Sarah, who in 1765 receives letters from Ezekiel referencing an estrangement between the siblings that he seeks to heal. Conley’s prose is slightly formal but also direct and rhythmic, as in the opening lines, written from a young Ezekiel’s perspective: “The shore of his mother, her warmth sheltering his infant body from the cold. The shore of his sister, pressing her nose on his.” An author’s note on Conley’s research into 18th-century clandestine gay life offers welcome context to Nathaniel and Arthur’s bewilderment and guilt over their undeniable love. This is a potent chronicle of an underexplored era in queer history. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Praise for All the World Beside
“A gorgeous, spellbinding work of historical fiction that conjures up a society wrestling with faith, love, and a sense of belonging. It is a heartbreaking account of forbidden passions and lost innocence told with intimate, lyrical beauty. It is truly sublime. I loved it.”
—Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo
"Part spell, part prayer, wholly mesmerizing. Garrard Conley casts the same magic in fiction as in the memoir that made him famous."
—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
“In this accomplishment of breathtaking prose, expert pacing, and extraordinary psychological intelligence, Conley presents a world as it was, as it is, and as it could be. A triumph.”
—Tess Gunty, National Book Award-winning author of Rabbit Hutch
“All the World Beside is a soaring, beautiful novel, at once sweeping and deeply personal. Conley has given us a great gift in this vivid and striking examination of the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are and who we hope to be. Part restoration and part reclamation, Conley’s bold new American myth simply sings.”
—Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life
"A richly textured, thrilling and scandalous romance, All the World Beside is a mesmerizing read. Skillfully paced and completely gripping from its first page, Conley gives us historical fiction at its most delicious and absorbing."
—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“Radical and gorgeous, decadent and deeply moral, All the World Beside upends the world as Christian patriarchs have taught us to know it. Garrard Conley’s ravishing novel embodies literature’s power to reach deep crevices that official accounts cannot, to water the dry earth of early American history and transform it into fertile gardens not only of the mind, but of the glorious, imperfect human spirit.
—Meredith Talusan, author of Fairest
“Garrard Conley has found a new and ravishing music: a language that straddles the 18th and 21st centuries, a vehicle for faith and desire. In its closing movements, this novel contains some of the finest writing I've encountered in recent American fiction.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
“Teaches us that in Puritan America the scarlet letter was not A for adultery but H for homosexuality and that the only romance with God is tense and tragic.”
—Edmund White
APRIL 2024 - AudioFile
Pete Cross performs this debut novel of a star-crossed love affair between minister Nathaniel Whitfield and physician Arthur Lyman in Puritan New England. As his congregation whispers about his relationship with Arthur and their wives begin to suspect what's going on behind closed doors, Nathaniel prays for an "Awakening" but fears his love for Arthur has brought God's disapproval. Pete Cross's narration captures the intense relationship between the two men; he performs their dialogue with deep emotion. As the two men's families begin to suspect their secret, Cross imbues his performance with tension, communicating both families' anxiety and feelings of helplessness. Cross's narration creates a truly heartfelt listening experience of this beautifully devastating novel. K.D.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-12-16
Conley, who thought deeply about the intersection of queer sexuality and religious persecution in Boy Erased: A Memoir (2016), plumbs that topic again in a sensitive novel.
The premise that two men in Puritan America fall in love with one another—and one of them’s a preacher—might sound like the setup of a Thanksgiving Saturday Night Live sketch, but Conley has crafted a rich, deeply researched story whose characters are alive with contradictions. This book is one of a number of recent historical novels about characters with same-sex desires who would have suffered grave consequences for being out: In Memoriam by Alice Winn and The New Life by Tom Crewe, to name just two. In 1730, Nathaniel and Catherine Whitfield have an infant son, Ezekiel, and an older daughter, Sarah. When she married Nathaniel, Catherine didn’t know that he’d first felt same-sex desire in England, where he was raised. He becomes a star preacher in America, credited with the miracle of leading “five hundred souls to be saved in one meeting” during the Great Awakening sweeping the Colonies. He establishes a village of 200 people in Massachusetts called Cana, where the Lyman family is among his flock. Arthur, the village physician, is married to stylish Anne; they have a daughter named Martha. Conley’s interest isn’t so much in the suspenseful machinations of how the two men connect but in the revealing ways they react to their feelings for each other at a time when even articulating their desire is profoundly shocking. Arthur’s love is pure and insistent; Nathaniel is deeply tortured, though he acknowledges to himself the love he feels for Arthur. This novel defies the contemporary mantra “It gets better,” and the conclusion feels true to the setting.
A novel that brings its Puritan setting alive with two men who are wounded for falling in love.
