Beautiful World, Where Are You
A Novel
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3.7 • 849 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.
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?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
It’s hard to say what fascinates the wildly popular Irish author Sally Rooney more: young love or the doomsday vibes of the 21st century. Her third novel explores both themes with aplomb, following two friends on the brink of turning 30. Alice, a famous writer, moves to western Ireland to recuperate from a mental breakdown, leaving her bestie, Eileen, alone in Dublin to handle a dead-end job and the fallout of a breakup. In a series of email exchanges, the women detail their tumultuous love affairs and share heady musings on religion, nationalism, and their relationship with a society seemingly hell-bent on destruction. “When we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources...we were worrying about sex and friendship instead,” Eileen writes. This conflict of priorities sums up a Rooney novel. With Beautiful World, Where Are You, she exquisitely captures the feeling of living in the shadow of an uncertain future while trying to appreciate the grace of our intimate relationships.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rooney (Normal People) continues her exploration of class, sex, and mental health with a cool, captivating story about a successful Irish writer, her friend, and their lovers. Alice Kelleher, 29, has suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of her work's popularity. After moving from Dublin to a small seaside town, she meets Felix, a local with a similar background—they both grew up working-class, and both have absent fathers—who works in a shipping warehouse. She invites him to accompany her to Rome, where he falls in love with her but resents what he takes to be her superior attitude. Meanwhile, in Dublin, Alice's university friend Eileen Lydon works a low-paying literary job and explores her attraction to a childhood friend who seems to return her feelings but continues seeing other women. Alice and Eileen update each other in long emails, which Rooney cleverly exploits for essayistic musings about culture, climate change, and political upheaval. Rooney establishes a distance from her characters' inner lives, creating a sense of privacy even as she describes Alice and Eileen's most intimate moments. It's a bold change to her style, and it makes the illuminations all the more powerful when they pop. As always, Rooney challenges and inspires.
Customer Reviews
A slog to a rush
This doesn’t have quite the inescapable pull of Normal People. Indeed to stay with the first 2/3 of the book, the dullness of the epistolary style Rooney used exclusively there, took some effort. It seemed almost worth giving up. But then you come back to most of the rest of the book and it is a rush headlong into a pretty exciting drama and excellent writing. Too bad that the goal of that rush is something so ordinary. Is that what happened—our characters locate that beautiful world. Too bad: a better concept would have been to have that beautiful world remain elusive.
Pattern in Rooney’s writing
Pretty much the same situations with just different scenarios from her previous two books.
An ok plot.
Complicated characters yet again.
I really had to push through with this one just to finish it and even after I wasn’t very satisfied and expected how it ended.
Holding Back the Years
Sally Rooney has firmly established her style in this latest book. The continuity is both good and bad. Where it’s lacking is in the moments that are raunchy or otherwise rom com stylized. Where it excels is in Rooney’s expert skill at illustrating the lives of sometimes painfully awkward people.
For all her talents, this book has a more disjointed and stilted flow than her previous ones. The most cohesive thread is her thought provoking metaphysical positions on relationships, culture, and history. This commentary is explored masterfully through a written conversation between characters.
Another great thread is how technology has become woven into the background of our lives. Through this theme Rooney explores how technology is a positive and negative influence in our lives. It bridges divides between people and at the same time further isolates us from even our closest connections.
In the end the good did not outweigh the bad enough to grab me. Seeing these characters lives play out, I could not help but be reminded of Simply Red’s “Holding Back the Years.” Like the song, this book is a melancholy reflection on what could have been. And at the same time we see that the Beautiful World we seek is in the quiet acceptance of what is.