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Beautyland

A gorgeous summer read about finding our people in this vast universe

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Beautyland

By: Marie-Helene Bertino
Narrated by: Andi Arndt
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Meet Adina: a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times, a companion to anyone who has ever felt homesick at home

Born at the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space, Adina is a baby of unusual perception. Tiny and jaundiced, she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognises she is different, not least because of her strange knowledge of a faraway planet. When a fax machine arrives at home, her suspicions are confirmed: it allows her to communicate with her extraterrestrial relatives, who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

As Adina makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and delights of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges her to share her observations with the world. Is there a chance there are others like her out there?

Beautyland is a shyly joyful novel about real life on our planet, the challenge of knowing ourselves and the miracle of finding our people in this vast universe.

‘One of the best books I have read this year’ KALIANE BRADLEY, Guardian
‘A perfect little polished garnet of a novel’ New York Times
‘Beautyland is a miracle. I’ll be rereading it forever’ KAVEH AKBAR

© Marie-Helene Bertino 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 First Contact Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction

Critic reviews

Bertino’s weightless, joyful prose style nevertheless freights huge emotion. As much about acceptance and community as it is about yearning and divergency, it’s a wonderful novel about making a life on Earth. This is one of the best books I have read this year (KALIANE BRADLEY, author of The Ministry of Time)
As tender as it is witty and perceptive... Beautyland is a novel that celebrates being different and reminds us that we are all, in our own way, a little bit alien (Susie Mesure)
[A] remarkable funny-sad novel... Astonishing
A highly original and sensitively rendered coming-of-age story. In Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino manages the incredibly difficult feat of making the strange feel familiar, and the familiar feel strange. I loved this idiosyncratic, funny, and wise novel (LAILA LALAMI, author of The Dream Hotel)
I loved this book. It is joyous and expansive and wonderfully funny (DAISY JOHNSON, author of Fen)
I think this is going to be a massive hit… an outsider’s perspective that is relentlessly inventive and always perfectly judged. It starts of quirky and deepens and deepens. I wanted to underline / steal a phrase or an insight on every other page (MARK HADDON, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime)
This book is endlessly surprising on the sentence level, but also as a story, and also in its tenderness. We might all need the unexpected love and perspective of a child alien at this point in human history. Beautyland is beautiful and hilarious and transcendent. It honestly feels like a message from another planet. Marie-Helene Bertino is an otherworldly talent (TOMMY ORANGE, author of There, There)
Marie-Helene Bertino's delicious, uncanny vision throughout Beautyland makes everything feel brand-new. The chapters are so propulsive one doesn't even fully notice the way she's subtly deconstructing the world. One page swiftly returns ubiquity to wonder, while the next reminds us that cruelty is a choice, that nothing is inevitable but death. It's impossible for a book to feel this fun and this urgent. Beautyland is a miracle. I'll be rereading it forever (KAVEH AKBAR, author of Martyr!)
A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life (DAKOTA JOHNSON)
As tender as it is witty and perceptive... Beautyland is a novel that celebrates being different and reminds us that we are all, in our own way, a little bit alien
All stars
Most relevant
I surprisingly enjoyed this book. I liked the writing and the story, to me, is quite original. There’s a distance between idina and everyone around her. The narrator has a great robotic, alien, disinterested human voice.

Alien anthropologist

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