All the World Beside

by Garrard Conley

An electrifying, deeply moving novel about the love story between two men in Puritan New England

Cana, a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister’s words a love so captivating it transcends language.

As the bond between these two men grows increasingly passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments that threaten to destroy them in this world and the next. And when the religious ecstasies of the Great Awakening begin to take hold, igniting a new era of zealotry, Nathaniel and Arthur search for a path out of an impossible situation, imagining a future for themselves that has no name. Their wives and children must do the same, looking beyond the known world for a new kind of wilderness, both physical and spiritual.

Set during the turbulent historical upheavals that shaped America’s destiny, and following in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter , All the World Beside reveals the very human lives beneath the surface of dogmatic belief.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Historical, Romance, Gay

352 pages, Hardcover

First published March 26, 2024

Reviews

[Louis Muñoz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Torn about this one. I WAS going to round up to 4 stars - I'll explain why in a moment - but I decided in the end to round down to 3 stars, which represents a solid book, "I liked it."

One of the things I appreciated the most about this book is that it looks at faith and sexuality and gender in a time that seems so removed from our own times and realities, as the book takes place in the early 1700s. Not only that, but the author explores what it might have been like having feelings other than the "norm" and hoping to fulfill those yearnings and desires in frontier America, far away from large cities or population centers where it might have been more possible to find kindred spirits. The various main characters, male, female, young, and old, are finding their way through these questions, for themselves or because of others, in the context of The Great Awakening, and it was interesting to read a novel that didn't shy away from characters having to reconcile God and theology and "right living" and gender roles with what the world expected good New England folk to believe and follow.

So why round down? I suppose the main reason is that while I was generally engaged throughout the book, and did care for the various characters and their struggles, the book didn't move me as much as I had hoped. I also questioned some of the actions of the two main father figures in light of the very small, insular community in which they lived. But at the end of the day: Kudos to the author for making the restricted and restrictive world of 18th-century North America feel very real, very claustrophobic, and very literally fraught with danger and with fear for one's soul and the souls of others.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

[Lottie from book club · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am going to have a tantrum

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book I would typically pick up for myself. I actually won a book, and instead of the book I won...I was sent this one. So, seeing it as "fate", I read it anyway.

This book is heartbreaking. The plight of individuals who didn't fit the mold of society back in the days of Puritan American was devastating. To be homosexual was akin to being a murderer. Religious fervor had people seeing demons in every person who was "different". In this books...it leads to so much confusion for the main characters, who bury themselves in religion to try to purify their souls. Such confusion shatters more than one family as a result.

This book is very well written, with an Americana feel of a classic. It is emotional and poignant. It also teaches a very important lesson...we are all different. Condemning someone just for being different is an awful way to live, and someone could just as easily do the same to us.

[Zea · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 — im really sad to say i didn’t like this book!! it has all the ingredients of a life-changing novel but it’s like the alchemy never took off — or never really got started. i wish thé writing had been less repetitively thematic and more environmentally and emotionally expressive — i wish we had been allowed to witness the tense unfolding of the central relationship rather than just being told about it in its aftermath. i think the best part of the book is the essay at the back — it got me all excited again for the novel it was pitching, as if i hadn’t just finished reading and being disappointed by it :(

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I support queer people finding creative ways to tell our stories, but this just didn’t sing for me. It was kind of a slog, and somehow the central relationship around which the whole story is told is one of the least fleshed out. There’s some heart to exploring same-sex love and its relationship to the church, but just not enough of it. It’s one of those books that tries to be a lot of things and unfortunately doesn’t excel at any of them. The intention is there, though—it’s just that it’s explained in a muddled afterward when my opinion was already formed.

[Tim Cummings · Rating 4 out of 5]

I talked about this book at my Reading Club. I stood up and said, "It's like The Scarlet Letter meets Brokeback Mountain," and though that received a titter or two, it's a profound and important comparison. Garrard Conley will always be a hero of mine for his book Boy Erased. What a beautiful, relevant, heartbreaking book and film. His debut historical fiction novel shares some DNA with it too-- mainly with the themes of gay men and God.

This is wonderfully written, eerie, raw, weird, and redolent of the Salem witch trials. You can feel the whiff of death on every page, the echoes of that time haunting the people of Cana as they make their way through their little New England world desperately attempting to avoid signing their names in the Red Book. Satan's in the woods, goodfolk (and we want to get lost there).

Perplexingly, the peripheral characters take center stage here. I wish the book spent more time with the two men around whom the story revolves, the fascinating and shadowy Minister Nathaniel and handsome, eager town Doctor, Arthur. Conley keeps them at a distance from the reader for the most part, and I wonder if the reasoning for that was like the monster in the horror movie: the less of it you see, the deeper its impact.... Nonetheless, it's wildly brave and necessary to elucidate queer stories from the forbidden annals of history, especially a story of queerness in the age of the Puritans. It could've used a little more suspense, and a much more intense climax, but it's a great book and I enjoyed it.

[Bill Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are good reasons to be excited to read this novel, such as the intentional echoing of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the evocation of the theology of Jonathan Edwards and the events of the Great Awakening in 18th-century New England, and, of course, the effort to represent/include LGBTQ+ people and stories in American history and literature. Unfortunately, none of these are carried off with great success…or, rather, this plot and these characters, and the lackluster (and often jarringly inauthentic) writing, aren’t up to the task. I appreciate the author’s purposes and efforts—but I was left unsatisfied and disappointed. (It doesn’t help that one of the main protagonists, a character with whom I’m certain the reader is supposed to empathize and maybe even admire, is to my mind downright creepy.)

[Christopher Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just finished this novel, I am trying to wrap my head around this fantastic novel! At first, I felt like the narrative moved a bit slow for my taste, but I trudged along and I am glad that I did. Some novels are meant to be savored, and this is one of them. I found the story to actually be beautiful, with astounding prose. I felt like I was there with the characters, going along with through the pain, and the jubilations that they felt.

Some things I found that took a star off for me, not making this a full 5 star read. I wish that Garrard would have included more scenes of the love between Nathaniel and Arthur. When those scenes appeared, though they were few and far between, I felt the passion as well as the true connection between these two men. I felt the pain their families were feeling, especially regarding Nathaniel’s family. The character of Ezekiel, wow, what a character! He took a bit of a backseat to the story at first, but the feel like he was the true star of the entire book. This was more the story about him, rather than Nathaniel and Arthur, in my opinion.

Another sticking point for me, as it would be with any book, is the length of the chapters. So much is crammed into one chapter, with the average page count for each chapter is around 40 (ish) pages. Pairing these down to an average page count of 15, maybe 20 pages would have been great, but it is what it is. (One chapter was 57 pages long!)

Overall, a wonderfully written novel of a time gone by. I did learn a lot in this novel and I am glad that I read it!

Final verdict…read this! 4 stars out of 5📚📚📚📚

[charlotte, · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rep: gay mcs, transfem mc

Galley provided by publisher

You know when you read a book then you leave off reviewing it for a month or so and suddenly you can’t remember a thing about it? That’s how memorable All the World Beside was to me. It was perfectly alright a read, but nothing really stuck out about it, apart from the fact that, while it centred on a supposedly perspective-altering relationship, you never really saw that. Which was probably the point, but if it has all these big consequences that spiral out of it, then perhaps it ought to be a little more on page? Maybe that’s just me. Anyway: a good read, but not a great one, ultimately.

[Christopher Alonso · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was exquisite, and my review is subjective here. Yes, lots of talk of faith and one's relationship to it, but what I find most interesting is how Conley worked with certain constraints to write about an idea that may have had no concrete language in colonial America. I trusted his writing to guide me through thinking about queerness in this space.

[BookChampions · Rating 5 out of 5]

*All the World Beside* is the queer version of *The Scarlet Letter* we were all waiting for. I got lost in the web of characters, their longings and their dalliances with daring and loneliness and shame. Unlike a speculative historical novel like *The Song of Achilles*, Garrard Conley (@gayrodcon - author of the astonishing *Boy Erased*) keeps the romance at arm's length and aims for something more expansive--a "queer utopia."

From his afterward: "What I've come to understand about the work of queer history is that the goal is not in finding answers but in expanding the way we think about the past, the way we make assumptions, in opening up imaginative possibilities that allow us to paint the whole human canvas with the bold, bright colors we see today. We don't have to pin all of our evidence on sex acts or sentimental declarations of love, tossing facts back and forth until the matter is no longer interesting. We can see the past as part of a larger mystery, the same mystery we see starting back at us when we look at the face of love."

The mysteries unfolding in this book were thrilling, fascinating, and sad. It expanded my understanding of what queer people (and their families) may have faced in the past, expanded my imagination, and expanded my heart. I want to reread it (and reread *The Scarlet Letter* alongside it next time), and I also would love to watch the film or limited-run series of this world. It felt so vivid and with such an important message to our 21st century.

[lou · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was....fine? everything just felt kind of under developed and under explored, like if you typed "queer puritan pastor" and "woman preacher" and "trans 18th century??" into an AI and this came out....disappointing but an interesting concept and one i'd like to see more fleshed out... and extra points taken off for calling foucault "daddy foucault" in the research section and having no mention of the publick universal friend in the research for this novel about a queer new england preacher who founded his own spiritual community after itinerant ministry

[Doug Reyes]

I don’t know how to rate this. I know it’s carefully and well written, it feels and sounds like Hawthorne and is to my limited knowledge, true to the behaviors of its time. The author thankfully makes no effort to sensationalize the writing. This might be the problem?? There is no moving energy here; I was not emotionally involved and didn’t feel invited to be anything other than a distanced observer.
Everything about this plot and premise should have been fascinating… but just… wasn’t.
I wish I could say I enjoyed reading this, but I did not.

[Will Skrip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conley creates a fascinating ecosystem of characters with so much depth and complexity, it seems impossible this clocks in at just over 300 pages. I admire that despite this book being about queerness and Christianity in Puritan New England, there is goodness at the core of each of the central characters, and they grapple with acceptance in such thoughtful ways. Reads like a classic, with nods to the contemporary. One of the most beautiful and well articulated deteriorations of a character at the end of their life, had me crying at a coffee shop!!

Absolutely one of my favorites of the year!

[Matty Standerski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is how you write a complex narrative about families, queerness, and gender stereotypes (and of course let’s make the setting Puritan New England!). The love between Arthur and Nathanial was so strong and so unrelenting my stomach is still in knots. I am so impressed with this book, every bone in my body felt every emotion.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel by Garrard Conley is outwardly about a gay love affair between two men in Puritan New England during the time of the Great Awakenings. However, it seems to me that this is about much more: religion, the place of women, love, identity, and maybe most of all, family. It is about the difficulty each family member has with the circumstances in which they find themselves. There is Nathaniel, the minister, and the “love of his life” Arthur, the town physician. There is Catherine, Nathaniel’s wife. She loves her husband and her husband loves her. There is Anne, Arthur’s wife. She loves her husband and her husband loves her. There are Sarah and Ezekiel, who later names himself Nobody, Nathaniel’s and Catherine’s children. Ezekiel has two fathers: Nathaniel and Arthur and one mother. And finally there is Martha, Anne and Arthur’s daughter. These are the good, if flawed characters in the novel. There are others of course, good and bad.

Catherine, Nathaniel, Anne, and Arthur, eventually come to a mostly unspoken agreement.

There is a fair amount of plot in the novel, but it seems to me that the characters are far more important than the plot. And importantly, I don’t think Conley tries to impose modern tropes or POVs on these characters. I think he has too much respect for them. The writing style is calm, and reminded me of The Scarlet Letter (I was happy to see that Conley cited Hawthorne as an inspiration in the Afterward).

However, there was one issue that kept me from rating this higher. Garrard Conley is obviously very religious and comes from a conservative Christian background (his father is a Missionary Baptist preacher and Garrard Conley is the author of Boy Erased). However, I am not religious and do not come from a religious background, so some of the deeper emotional resonances escape me. I understand struggling with ones sexual identity, coming out to family, etc., but religion is a mystery to me in more ways than one.

In any case, this is a wonderful novel. I almost didn’t read it because of some negative reviews, but I’m glad I did. And anyone who does read the novel should also read the Afterward, which Conley titles The Unfathomable. It is great.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

"All the World Beside" tells the tale of a beautiful queer love affair between a Puritan priest and the town doctor. I enjoyed the story for what it was, but after reading the author's notes at the end, I appreciated the novel's significance even more. Hats off to Garrard Conley for conveying the purpose behind writing this book so well. He explains that LGBTQ+ history is largely absent from history books and can only be found in police reports and a few scattered books. By writing this novel, Conley shares history as it should have been shared and recorded, demonstrating that queer love did exist and was real. The book clearly draws inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne and "The Scarlet Letter." I also found it interesting that Conley's characters comment on the Salem witch trials, understanding the wrongs and shame associated with what happened in Salem. There is an awareness that nobody wants a similar situation in the town of Cana, so those who know of Nathaniel and Arthur's love affair keep it secret for fear of repercussions. By mentioning Salem, Conley roots his story in history. I enjoyed the book, but I feel sad for every single character. Nobody wins in this story.

[Whitney]

For a book about the social trauma experience of gay lovers, trans/nonbinary perspective, and women’s rights during the First Great Awakening, this fell pretty flat.

Meanwhile, my favorite story about Anne Hutchinson, who is only mentioned once, is that she lived across the street from her nemesis John Winthrop and they would watch each other from the candlelight in their front window as they entertained services for their opposing religious views like an episode of fucking Family Guy. Covenant of grace v. Covenant of works for life babey

[Ricky Trogdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

:(

[Macie Gelb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could probably reach 5 stars if I read it on paper. Audiobook was still incredible and I really enjoyed it. Great characters and beautiful writing.

[Conor Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the same way I felt about The Song of Achilles, I wish this novel had been available to me in high school when I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The insistent imagination of this book to argue for and ground queerness and queer love (beyond the simply boundaries of sex) so far back in history has been transformative for me. The nuance of this story to generate perspectives from so many differing queer and feminist intersections with religion and history is a masterpiece.

Teach this book in schools; teach it in tandem with Hawthorne. Please.

It will save lives and change people for the better.

[Victoria Hall-Palerm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can appreciate the skill that went into this book, but ultimately I didn’t care enough about any of the people in it to enjoy the story. The prose is beautiful but the long discursions about God and faith made me kind of weary after a while. Ultimately just not really my cup of tea

[Dustin Street · Rating 4 out of 5]

Character (5/5)
Plot & Pacing (3.5/5)
Setting & Surroundings (4/5)
Dialogue & Diction (4.5/5)
Craft & Voice (5/5)
Reading Experience (4/5)

Final Rating:
4.3/5

Comments:
It’s easy for even queer people to sometimes think we didn’t exist throughout history. But we know, thanks to our brains, as well as science, that queerness is not chosen, but innate. And because of this, because our ancestors were every bit as biologically human as we are today, the same proportion of them must have also been born queer. They didn’t have the vocabulary in the Puritan age that we now have today, and that’s what Garrard Conley has so beautifully captured in this book. He managed to examine queerness in a space and time where it is rarely imagined to have existed, but exist it did.

I also love that this book is not just an effort to pull our modern sensibilities over the past like a blanket, but rather a conversation with our time, by way of echoed voices from another. The craft in this book is on another level. The research that went into it, and the thought, are par none. I so enjoyed Garrard’s note at the end. I’m so happy to have finally gotten to read this one!

This book is a modern classic, every bit as subversive and questioning of society as Hawthorne’s work was in his own day. Conley is our Hawthorne, and we are the better for it.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a way, All the World Beside reminded me of Portrait of A Lady on Fire. Initially, I thought the book might be better if it spent more time on Arthur and Nathaniel’s relationship. However, I understand why we spent time on other characters because it made the book seem significantly more well-rounded.

I did enjoy reading this book, but I never felt extremely compelled to pick it back up. I should take a break from historical fiction and read something contemporary next.

I appreciate the concept of this book, and I’m glad it exists. Some tender moments between Arthur and Nathaniel conveyed their love for each other beautifully. I could see this being adapted into a movie one day.

[artie · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautifully written, well researched, heartbreaking story. i enjoyed the mystery and opacity of the narration style more than i expected. the author’s essay at the end was possibly my favorite part of the whole thing.

[Stephen Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Religiously charged and beautifully written. The love between Arthur and Nathaniel transcends a time in history where two men in love could never be, and tells the story of how it unfolds and the love and strife they struggle through because of it- along with the strife their families must face along with them. This book had me crying by the end. The research that went into depicting this time in history is truly astonishing and informative in letting us see another side of queer history that is often erased and buried.

[Emily Mayo · Rating 4 out of 5]

deeply melancholy. made me more interested in early American Protestantism than I’ve been in a hot sec. not always conclusive or satisfactory — I would have loved to see more of the main relationship, which feels like a weird thing to say in a book that centers around a queer relationship for all of its physical and emotional conflict — but some of the sparest and most beautiful writing I’ve read in a long time. someone give sarah a hug please

[Louie · Rating 5 out of 5]

ugly crying on the floor over the tragic gay men. I’ll never look at mice or flowers or keyholes the same way ever again.

[molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded down. My heart was aching throughout the whole book. It's very slow and a character study of these two families, which I really enjoyed delving into the minds of. I personally wish some plot points were covered on page more (often something was implied to happen between one season ending and the next beginning) as well as more insight into certain characters over others. There was often I was in someone's perspective wishing I was back in another character's perspective instead. These are minor nitpicks though, because this book truly captured my attention for the span that I was reading it. These characters are going to stick with me for a while, I know that. I loved the exploration of queerness and religion and how those can (and did) intersect historically.

[nell · Rating 2 out of 5]

my winning streak is over because i was unfortunately just really bored by this one to the point where it felt such a chore to pick up. nothing that egregious but just the sum of flat characters i didnt care for (and children who speak like no child has ever spoken, eighteenth-century or otherwise), a love story where literally no work is put into establishing or justifying or demonstrating the love these characters had for each other, and a dry prose style i didnt enjoy. almost everyone irritated me (sarah and ezekiel in particular) so that the end did nothing for me, and the relationships were so thin and unconvincing…media like this is what gives people the false impression that no one before the twentieth century loved their families. or felt joy