Everything Here Is Beautiful

‟A tender but unflinching portrayal of the bond between two sisters.”—Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You

A dazzling novel of two sisters and their emotional journey through love, loyalty, and heartbreak

Two sisters—Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister’s protector; Lucia, the headstrong, unpredictable one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing. When their mother dies and Lucia starts hearing voices, it is Miranda who must find a way to reach her sister. But Lucia impetuously plows ahead, marrying a bighearted, older man only to leave him, suddenly, to have a baby with a young Latino immigrant. She moves her new family from the States to Ecuador and back again, but the bitter constant is that she is, in fact, mentally ill. Lucia lives life on a grand scale, until, inevitably, she crashes to earth.

Miranda leaves her own self-contained life in Switzerland to rescue her sister again—but only Lucia can decide whether she wants to be saved. The bonds of sisterly devotion stretch across oceans—but what does it take to break them?

Told in alternating points of view, Everything Here Is Beautiful is, at its heart, the story of a young woman’s quest to find fulfillment and a life unconstrained by her illness. But it’s also an unforgettable, gut-wrenching story of the sacrifices we make to truly love someone—and when loyalty to one’s self must prevail over all.

Mira T. Lee’s work has been published in numerous quarterlies and reviews, including TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded an Artist’s Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2012. She lives with her husband and two young sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is her debut novel.