Beautiful World, Where Are You

hardcover, 240 pages

Published Sept. 7, 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-60260-4

(2 reviews)

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?

2 editions

airdog reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Tightrope writing

3 stars

Sally Rooney likes to play with fire. She writes an impressive quantity of words about nothing ( what some would call "bird brain" talk) but manages to slip in those incredible insights about life and relationships that keep you wanting more and keep you reading just as you're just about to quit . I'm usually not very tolerant of insignificant chatter but I have to admit that I was hooked in this case. And she achieves that in a very classical structure with an intro, a development and a conclusion.

sarah reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

the writing! but the characters!

4 stars

I don’t have to like the characters in the books I read (and actually as a former EngLit prof, find that way of reading for likeability or relatedness to be super limiting). But having said that, with every single Rooney novel, I struggle with frustration and wanting to shake the characters, especially the young women. I think this is probably the point of it all? This is gorgeously written, especially the third-person chapters describing the characters’ actions etc and the cinematic looking-at-ness of those sections (she tells you insistently what it looks like the characters are feeling from their actions rather than telling you how they feel). But I still wondered the whole time, as I have with Normal and Conversations, why I was reading it.