Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Simon Van Booy.

Simon is the award winning and best selling author of nine books of fiction and three anthologies of philosophy. He has written for the NYT, The Financial Times, NPR and the BBC. In 2013 he founded Writers for Children, a project which helps young people build confidence in their storytelling abilities through annual awards.

His latest work is The Sadness of Beautiful Things published this month by Penguin.

And as most of you know, I own an independent bookshop, Wellington Square Books, and I have just ordered all of Simon’s books, including his children’s books about Gertie Milk.

The Sadness of Beautiful Things is a book of short stories that grab you, from the epigraph on, and hold you and release you throughout. In fact, I went back and read most of the stories two times and one specific one three times. Each time you read and re-read you discover more about yourself and the characters in the book as well as recognizing what the title represents and what that means to the characters’ lives and to our own. I love short stories and these are some of the best I have read. As I have told my customers, “Buy this book. If you don’t like it, bring it back”. So far they have each flown far away, never to return.