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Books

07th Sep 2021

Sally Rooney releases new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You

Tara Trevaskis Hoskin

The author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends has released her third novel.

Beautiful World, Where Are You follows the lives of best friends Alice and Eileen as they navigate their own romantic relationships.

Alice is a young novelist set on travelling to Rome with a man named Felix, while Eileen remains in Dublin as she comes to terms with a recent breakup.

Rooney is known for her ability to create intense and intricate relationships between her characters, and this story is set to follow suit.

As the blurb reads; “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.” 

Relationships between people are a central theme within Rooney’s work and while this may seem like a simple concept it creates stories that can remain both simplistic yet emotive. She also includes Dublin again as a central setting in this novel, which is bound to give Irish readers a sense of familiarity.

If the relationship that we saw between Connell and Marianne both on screen and in the novel, Normal People, is anything to go by, the relationships in this novel will also leave readers feeling both heartbroken and elated.

Normal People became a best seller in the US, selling 64,000 copies in the first four months of its release.

It gained even more fame when BBC Three adapted it for television, for which Rooney was nominated for an Emmy.

The Castlebar native has encountered lots of success since her novel debut Conversations with Friends in 2017, which is now also to be adapted into a tv series by BBC Three. 

Beautiful World, Where Are You is now available to buy in shops nationwide.