Philip Beard
Philip Beard is a writer, teacher, and attorney.
DEAR ZOE
(Viking, April 2005)
Philip Beard’s stunning debut novel is fifteen-year-old Tess DeNunzio’s letter to her sister, Zoe, lost to a hit-and-run driver on a day when it seemed that nothing mattered but the tragedies playing out in New York and Washington. Dear Zoe is a remarkable study of grief, adolescence, and healing with a pitch-perfect narrator who is at once sharp and naïve, world- worried and self-centered, funny and heartbreakingly honest. Tess begins her letter to Zoe as a means of figuring out her own life, her place in the world, but the result is a novel of rare power and grace that tells us much about ours. BACKCOVER: “Like The Lovely Bones, [Dear Zoe] is a piercing look at how family recovers from a devastating loss. Everything about this moving, powerful debut rings true.â€
LOST IN THE GARDEN
(Viking, May 2006)
Michael Benedict, overprivileged but undermotivated, seems to have it all: a beautiful wife, two lovely daughters, a law practice that provides a comfortable life for his family, and a natural golf swing. Can it all unravel in a few short months?
As he did in his debut, Dear Zoe, Philip Beard has created a pitch-perfect narrator who ruefully and winningly pulls the reader into the confusing world that is his life. When his wife announces she’s pregnant, at age forty, with a “surprise†baby, Michael’s underwhelming response disturbs the fault lines of both his marriage and his psyche. He tries to find solace in his obsessions: his golf game, his newfound luck in the stock market, and, since his wife has cut him off, some kind of sex that isn’t exactly extramarital.
Like Tom Perrotta and Nick Hornby, Philip Beard writes insightfully, movingly, and with the lightest touch about the messiness of life. Anyone who wakes up some mornings feeling life is still a work in progress will find this the perfect summer read.
