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Beautiful World, Where Are You

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Beautiful World, Where Are You

By: Sally Rooney
Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
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About this listen

' Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney's best novel.' THE TIMES

The *new* novel from the internationally bestselling author of Normal People.

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 worry about sex and friendship 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?

'A tour de force. The dialogue never falters, and the prose burns up the page.'
GUARDIAN

'Rooney's strongest writing thus far . . . There is a touching honesty and truthfulness in these pages, along with a quiet brilliance.'
FINANCIAL TIMES

'The book moved me to tears more than once . . . Rooney's best novel.'
THE TIMES

'Written with immense skill and illuminated by an endlessly incisive intelligence.'
IRISH TIMES

' Beautiful World, Where Are You is not just worth reading. It's worth thinking about.'
IRISH INDEPEDENT

'Brilliantly done: gripping, steamy, unbearably sad.'
TELEGRAPH

©2022 Sally Rooney (P)2022 Faber & Faber Coming of Age Contemporary Contemporary Romance Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Romance

Critic reviews

'Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney's best novel.' The Times

'A tour de force.' Anne Enright, Guardian

'Rooney's best novel yet.' Brandon Taylor, New York Times
All stars
Most relevant
The author’s expertise is perceptively and sympathetically portraying the feelings and emotions of ordinary people.

A keyhole view of real lives

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This book had huge expectations resting on it even before it's publication. Some reviewers were bored by the lengthy, philosophical email exchanges between the heroine and her best friend. I too found them sometimes difficult to follow but worth rewinding and re-listening. It made me realise that I do not have enough such conversations in my life but too much shallow social media cotton wool padding instead.
During the course of the book I became more and more irritated with Eleanor, the whining best friend who needs a good shake, and by the males protagonists who are simply too kind, too patient, too emotionally mature to be true. Perhaps that's wishful thinking on Sally's part or perhaps she, who is half my age, really has such men in her life. Hence I was about to give the book four stars. Then, after I had finished, I found myself missing the conversation with the characters. I was looking forward to sitting down with a cup of tea and listening only to realise disappointedly that it was over. And a book who makes me feel like that deserves 5 stars, irritating protagonists or not.
I loved the readers voice but she tried a little to hard with the men who all ended up sounding like Irish caricatures.

I missed the conversation with the characters

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I loved it. A poignant and strong read. Hopefully and sweet but heartbreaking at times.

Her best yet

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Not the best from Rooney, but she still canwrite. The reader unfortunately is quite bad at male voices, they're

Not the best narrator.

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I like Sally Rooney’s flat prose style, and enjoyed her previous two books. I remember thinking that when I first learnt that a drama series was to be made of Normal People ‘how can they do that -nothing happens in it’. The same can be said of her second book. This difficult third album is more of the same. Beautiful prose, well drawn characters but nothing happens at all. There is virtually no plot, and what little there is can be easily predicted. A lot of the book is taken up by e-mails between the two main characters, young women who met at university- one a feted writer who has amassed a small fortune and a mass of literary awards after two novels ( how did Sally Rooney possibly come up with this character!), and the other drifting along in a low paid job in a literary magazine. How much you enjoy these section of the book will depend on your patience for undergraduate conversation and jejune political opinions. I liked the point where Rory, who works long hours at a soul destroying job in an Amazon warehouse learns that the tiny literary magazine is subsidised by government grants from his taxes.
The book ends quite suddenly, with a chirpy summing up chapter. The audiobook is very well read by Aoife MacMahon who I have listened to before reading books by Marian Keyes. I don’t know if it was her voice, or the Irish setting, or the fact that some of the writing is very witty, that made me think at times that I was listening to a book by the Marvellous Ms Keyes - but a slightly dull one, where nothing really happens.

Like a duller Marian Keyes

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