Synopses & Reviews
The instant #1 New York Times bestselling novel by Sally Rooney, author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.
“Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s best novel yet. Funny and smart, full of sex and love and people doing their best to connect.” —Brandon Taylor, The New York Times Book Review
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young--but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Review
“In this ambitious novel of sentiment and ideas, which is so up to the minute in its global concerns, Rooney ironically reaches back to one of the oldest forms of the novel, the epistolary or letter form, to tell her story . . . Rooney’s novel, like all great fiction, is open-ended.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“The book moved me to tears more than once . . . Rooney’s best novel.” —James Marriott, The Times (London)
“Even more moving than Normal People or Conversations with Friends . . . Beautiful World, Where Are You is still very dialectical and Marxist and interested in political debates. Yet it is also a love letter to the novel as a form of art . . . Beautiful World, Where Are You is a love letter to all of us, to all the ways we love.” —Constance Grady, Vox
About the Author
Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Conversations with Friends and Normal People. She also contributed to the writing and production of the Hulu/BBC television adaptation of Normal People.