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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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' 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
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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
I love Sally Rooney’s writing - really enjoyable listen especially with the Irish accent of the reader. Highly recommend for engaging easy listening.

Engaging

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This will sadly be the last book I read or review of Sally Rooney's work, which in the case I found to be a poorer echo of Normal People. Her flawed and hypocritical decision not to translate her book into Hebrew due to the so-called cultural boycott of Israel, fills me with such loathing that I cannot abide by it. But since one of her leading characters revels in her new-found wealth as a writer, I guess it's easy to understand why she doesn't apply her high principles to countries with much larger readerships and much greater crimes, because she has too much $ to lose if she did. Shame on you Sally Rooney.

Book is good, but the author's hypocrisy is sad

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I’d describe this book as ‘patchy’. At times, the dialogue is as detailed as Normal People where the micro feelings and observations of people, behaviours and environments are exquisite. At other times, the emails between the two BFFs seem absolutely endless, with a range of external topics given so meticulous scrutiny that I was tempted to toss the whole thing in. Just as I’d get to the point of total frustration, there would arrive an in-the-moment beautiful interaction between characters that was heartbreakingly lovely and I’d grumpily carry on. While I won’t reveal the end, I will say that it seemed out of character and sudden (and at the same time not sudden enough!).

Patchy yet it finally got there.

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Although the female characters were, purposely so, desperately self-indulgent & needy, to a point of almost frustration, it lead me to reconsider my younger self & how I treated love, I suspect I was similarly as needy, because of my lack of confidence… I wonder what my 21 year old self might have thought if she had read it then…

Desperately wonderful- on purpose

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A great read ! An interesting perspective of the tales and tribulations of friendship and relationships. Narrator made the story appealing and was good to listen to.
The ending was a little abrupt though. Overall, worth a read

Another great Rooney read

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