Beautiful World, Where Are You

Alice and Eileen are best friends in their early thirties living in Dublin, managing their professional lives, their romantic complications, and the persistent sense that the world they grew up expecting to inherit is not the world that arrived. Felix and Simon orbit their lives — Felix difficult, damaged, present; Simon principled, loving, absent in a way that cannot quite be named. Sally Rooney’s third novel is her most spacious: less compressed than its predecessors, it allows itself to be uncertain in ways that Conversations with Friends and Normal People were not.

The novel is also, quietly, Rooney’s most ambitious: an attempt to write about beauty and goodness in a world that feels neither beautiful nor good, to find in the ordinary textures of contemporary life something that might, with sufficient attention, be called meaning.

For readers who have followed Rooney’s development with care — a novel that reveals how seriously she is thinking about what fiction can do. Published by Faber & Faber.