A September Indie Next Pick
“[Rooney’s] writing about sex is taut and direct. It’s a narrative style I associate with the films of Andrew Haigh and Joanna Hogg, two great visual poets of social anxiety and reticence. Rooney’s dialogue is frequently perfect . . . Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s best novel yet."
—Brandon Taylor, The New York Times Book Review
“A tour de force. The dialogue never falters, and the prose burns up the page.”
—Anne Enright, The Guardian
“The book moved me to tears more than once . . . Rooney’s best novel.”
—James Marriott, The Times (UK)
“It’s a testament to Rooney's curious, cerebral gifts as a writer that she not only draws her readers into tolerating long stretches of such ruminations but makes them so entertaining. We feel we’re in good company with our own end-time anxieties . . . In this ambitious novel of sentiment and ideas, which is so up to the minute in its global concerns, Rooney ironically reaches back to one of the oldest forms of the novel, the epistolary or letter form, to tell her story.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“Even more moving than Normal People or Conversations with Friends . . . Beautiful World, Where Are You is still very dialectical and Marxist and interested in political debates. Yet it is also a love letter to the novel as a form of art—and, by extension, to the ways in which human beings relate to one another . . . Beautiful World, Where Are You is a love letter to all of us, to all the ways we love.”
—Constance Grady, Vox
“Rooney hammers out the problems and promises of contemporary novels and contemporary life—all while reminding us of her distinctive style’s disarming intimacies . . . This is Rooney stepping into herself as a fully-formed artist, ready to defend the validity and originality of her methods . . . Beautiful World combines the intricacies of Rooney’s lightning-rod style, like her deep well of sympathy for her characters and her precise economy of language, with a growing maturity.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“This is a book that insists on the power of enduring relationships and also on their difficulty . . . Beautiful World, Where Are You offers the same pleasures as Rooney’s previous novels, and, in the discursive emails that Alice and Eileen exchange, the additional pleasure of her voice as an essayist . . . A forceful case for caring about such seemingly insignificant matters as ‘whether people break up or stay together.’”
—Molly Fischer, The Cut
“Rooney’s strongest writing thus far . . . There is a touching honesty and truthfulness in these pages, along with a quiet brilliance.”
—Diana Evans, Financial Times
“Brilliantly done: gripping, steamy, unbearably sad.”
—Susannah Goldsbrough, The Telegraph
“Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s most buoyant and best work . . . Rooney gives her characters, herself, and the reader permission to feel the full range of the often-embarrassing emotions that come with loving and liking other people, despite impending doom, knowing that chaos and hope and stupidity all exist, messily, together.”
—Sophia June, Nylon
“Wise, romantic, and ultimately consoling . . . It’s a pleasure to read smart women courting each other’s love and admiration . . . Like any serious artist she takes whatever material she’s handed and makes meaning from it.”
—Hermione Hoby, 4Columns
“Reading the Rooney corpus in sequence feels like watching the characters grow up and mature into a life of complicated interpersonal relationships. Rooney’s special skill is the ability to place readers at eye level with her characters and plot, to sneak them into the world of her story as a participant in the room . . . She pulls the reader in with her famously unadorned sentences and creates an intimacy akin to peering over the characters’ shoulders.”
—Kyung Mi Lee, The Boston Globe
“Delightfully dirty at times and compulsively readable . . . Though it admittedly feels wickedly satisfying to be caught once again in Rooney’s web of friendship-courtship entanglements, the pining glances, wounded squabbles and even the raunchy, sexy scenes aren’t the reasons to read Beautiful World . . . Instead, it’s what Rooney does with the other chapters — probing letters between Alice and Eileen—that feels so experimental and exciting.”
—Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
“In failing to look for the nation in these books, we fail to see Rooney’s stories in all their richness . . . The book’s Irishness is like its professional jealousies or its sexual tensions: bottled up for almost too long, then relieved in one moment . . . Rooney’s books happen in a particular place. Her study of relationships is all the more rewarding when you give that place a name. Its name is Ireland: Sally Rooney is Irish.”
—Sean O’Neill, Gawker
“[Sally Rooney’s] most overtly personal work yet . . . As someone drifting ever-nearer to 30 myself, Beautiful World resonated in a way that Rooney’s earlier works did not. That said, teetering on the cusp of your thirties is hardly a prerequisite for reading the novel . . . There's a weight, an urgency that grounds Alice and Eileen's narratives, and it's the same weight and urgency every one of us has been living with for the past 18 months.”
—Isabel Jones, InStyle
“Extremely well-written longing. Three novels in, and it’s still what Rooney does best: ensnare us over and over in the jet-fueled heat between good-looking (and supernaturally articulate) Irish youths . . . Each sentence builds like a brushstroke: on its own, any particular line can seem pedestrian. Assembled together, we get whole scenes of otherwise banal parties and bus rides, glances cast and bodies rearranged, all rendered to a storybook-like effect.”
—Delia Cai, Vanity Fair
“Fundamentally [Sally Rooney’s] books are pleasurable to read . . . Beautiful World, Where Are You contains enough innovation—stylistic playfulness, a new, more cerebral mode, a variation in perspective—to signal that she is trying new things.”
—Katie Roiphe, The Wall Street Journal
“[Sally Rooney’s] third consecutive banger after Normal People and Conversations with Friends, an intimate and piercingly smart story about sex and friendship . . . Rooney is masterful at finding profound meaning in the quotidian, in ramping up the tension and heightening the stakes in the most microscopic of interactions. The pages fly as fast as in any thriller to find out if these four young adults can figure out how and why to live.”
—Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
“I would gladly read any glimmer of [Rooney’s] thoughts refracted through a character . . . When you spend a lot of time thinking about how civilization is declining and Earth is burning, it becomes clear that there are some rare joys, and that horniness is one of them. Rooney would not write so carefully about sex if she didn’t see intrinsic value in pleasure, in gratifying the senses during our one spin on the planet.”
—Blythe Robertson, Bustle
“I abandon books like a drunken sailor and in another mood, I might have tossed Rooney overboard. But then, there it was, on page 40: a sentence of such exquisite bitterness that it cut my sweet summer day in half. Was there more where that came from? I simply had to know . . . Gentle, intense, emotional . . . The plot is pretty Austenian: A bunch of people become mutually enlightened about the true nature of themselves and each other.”
—Molly Young, Vulture
“In many ways, this book, a work of both philosophy and romantic tragicomedy about the ways people love and hurt one another, is exactly the type of book one would expect Rooney to write out of the political environment of the past few years. But just because the novel is so characteristic of Rooney doesn’t take anything away from its considerable power . . . A novel of capacious intelligence and plenty of page-turning emotional drama.”
—Kirkus (Starred)
"A cool, captivating story . . . 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.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred)
“Writing with her trademark truthfulness and wit, Rooney compels with both these meta-conversations and the actions of her characters’ lives: their enthralling, intimate, and consequential grappling with themselves, with one another, and with beauty, sex, and friendship. Rooney's first novel since Normal People, which became a popular and award-winning Hulu series, is steadily drawing excitement.”
—Booklist (Starred)
“Keen and tersely delivered observations about the follies of youth, sex, and friendships.”
—Adam Price, The Millions (Most Anticipated)
“As much as she resists the title, Rooney’s new book may just cement her status as a leading voice of the millennial generation.
—Harper’s Bazaar (Most Anticipated)
“Delicious.”
—Emily Temple, Lit Hub (Most Anticipated)
“Instead of latching onto hardships, digging through them until every last nuance has been overturned and all the trauma and tragedy has been exhausted, Rooney carries her readers and characters through them in realistic portrayals of the way time and life don’t wait for people to recover . . . For those who have yet to hop on the Sally Rooney bandwagon, it’s never too late.” —Oriana Christ, Zyzzyva
★ 09/01/2021
Having met in college in Dublin, Eileen and Alice have been best friends for years. Alice is a critically acclaimed novelist and world traveler, while Eileen continues to work at a Dublin office. Alice relocates to Ballina on Ireland's west coast, where she meets Felix, a local laborer, while Eileen spends time with childhood friend Simon. As these four people explore their relationships with one another, Eileen and Alice exchange emails about ecological collapse, political cynicism, consumerism, economic inequality, civic decline, and religious and aesthetic experiences. While these fraught themes complicate Alice and Eileen's friendship as well as their respective relationships with Felix and Simon, they do not discourage them from determining that love can prevail even in the midst of chaos. VERDICT Rooney's third novel deals with some of the emotional dynamics and ideas explored in Conversations with Friends and Normal People but expands and enriches them by depicting human dramas against vast historical backdrops, amplifying art's essential status in human life. Once again, she has written a masterly and significant work of fiction that is both traditional and innovative.—John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
Narrator Aoife McMahon’s voice makes the conflicts of Millennials beautiful in today’s messy world. Author Sally Rooney presents a tableau of Irish friends—Eileen, Alice, Felix, and Simon—who wrestle with relationships, mental health, politics, and the purpose of life. McMahon’s acting dexterity shows in seamless shifts between points of view, characters, and emotions. Male to female, white-collar to blue-collar, anger to passion—her crisp Irish accent makes these transitions with the lightness of a lark. Likewise, via McMahon, Rooney’s peerless descriptions imprint upon the mind’s eye. The listener won’t soon forget a silk blouse caressed like a pet, freckled arms made pink by the sun, the coast of Ireland at nightfall, or the forgiveness of a best friend. A hopeful Millennial journey shines through McMahon’s performance. E.S.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
★ 2021-06-16
Two erudite Irishwomen struggle with romance against the backdrop of the Trump/Brexit years.
Eileen and Alice have been friends since their university days. Now in their late 20s, Eileen works as an editorial assistant at a literary magazine in Dublin. Alice is a famous novelist recovering from a psychiatric hospitalization and staying in a large empty rectory on the west coast of Ireland. Since Alice’s breakdown, the two have kept in touch primarily through lengthy emails that alternate between recounting their romantic lives and working through their angst about the current social and political climate. (In one of these letters, Eileen laments that the introduction of plastic has ruined humanity’s aesthetic calibration and in the next paragraph, she’s eager to know if Alice is sleeping with the new man she’s met.) Eileen has spent many years entangled in an occasionally intimate friendship with her teenage crush, a slightly older man named Simon who is a devout Catholic and who works in the Irish Parliament as an assistant. As Eileen and Simon’s relationship becomes more complicated, Alice meets Felix, a warehouse worker who is unsure what to make of her fame and aloofness. In many ways, this book, a work of both philosophy and romantic tragicomedy about the ways people love and hurt one another, is exactly the type of book one would expect Rooney to write out of the political environment of the past few years. But just because the novel is so characteristic of Rooney doesn’t take anything away from its considerable power. As Alice herself puts it, “Humanity on the cusp of extinction [and] here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?”
A novel of capacious intelligence and plenty of page-turning emotional drama.
