Simon van booy author biography john

Simon Van Booy has written a new book.

Saying it like that is accurate, but also completely incomplete.

Instead, one could say that Mr. Van Booy, a prolific, award-winning author and frequent South Fork visitor, has written his first linear narrative. One could say he's followed a nugget of advice that he often quotes to his own writing students, based on a saying by Vladimir Nabokov: Write "on the surface of the present."

In "Sipsworth," which hits shelves at BookHampton, Canio's, and other bookshops both independent and national on May 7, a reader will spend a lot of time in a cottage with a reclusive octogenarian and her unexpected new friend, a mouse.

"It's very different" from his other stories, Mr. Van Booy explained over French fries, way too much ketchup, and a dessert of blueberry pie at John Papas Cafe, during a recent extended stay in Springs to mind a friend's house.

"There are no flashbacks or jumps in time. It just goes three weeks in a person's life. There are only four characters, and only one of them is a main character. The reader spends a lot of time in a sitting room with the main character. When you're writing in one place without flashbacks, without a lot of characters, every detail has to be perfect beca

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It started when his goldfish died. “She was sick for a long time,” says the writer Simon Van Booy. Afterward, he mentioned to his wife that “maybe we should get a new little friend.”

When he told her he hoped their next pet could be a rodent, she resisted initially but eventually relented. At a pet store, Van Booy came upon the tank of feeder mice — “for people who own snakes” — and saw one mouse all alone. “He was just sitting there, like he’d given up. And I thought yeah, that’s the mouse for me.”

It was a good friendship, Van Booy says. “Once I stopped treating him like a mouse he really exceeded what you’d expect a mouse to be able to do, emotionally.”

That mouse and the following one (their names were Tiresias and Sipsworth) inspired Van Booy’s latest novel, “Sipsworth,” in which Helen, a woman in her 80s living alone, becomes friends with a mouse. Their bond changes Helen’s life.

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Van Booy thinks we all ought to give mice more credit than we do, both for their extraordinary role in medical research and for their social capabilities. “They’re such sweet creatures,” he says. “They crave affection and love and play.”

And so do human beings, including

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9 Great Books with Anthropoidal Characters

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A Kestrel back a Knave

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The Heart stare the Valley

By Nigel Hinton

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