Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. 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 have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships 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 Novel

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Amelia Hruby

What is the relationship of the famous author to their famous books anyway? If I had bad manners and was personally unpleasant and spoke with an irritating accent, which in my opinion is probably the case, would it have anything to do with my novels? Of course not. The work would be the same, no different. And what do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity? Nothing. So why, why, is it done this way? Whose interests does it serve? It makes me miserable, keeps me away from the one thing in my life that has any meaning, contributes nothing to the public interest, satisfies only the basest and most prurient curiosities on the part of readers, and serves to arrange literary discourse entirely around the domineering figure of the author, whose lifestyle and idiosyncrasies must be picked over in lurid detail for no reason. I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all mny energy. I hate her ways of expresing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead.

When I submitted the first book, I just wanted to make enough money to finish the next one. I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing. People who intentionally become famous — I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it — are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. 

Stella

And who am I to ask for humility and openness from other people? What have I ever given the world to ask so much in return?

Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.

elly

I also feel certain it's better to be deeply loved than widely liked.

clara

Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws along the South Circular Road. The artificial buttered taste of popcorn in the cinema. Pale-yellow sky in the evening, Thomas Street draped in mist.

And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.

And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that - like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.

Srijita Sarkar 

If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn't have made me who I am.

It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion. Like a malignant growth where the sacred used to be.

Do you know what you look like? One of those girl statues we saw in Rome.

I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things, or some other reason. Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I don’t have to feel anxious about it anymore.

If I tried I’m sure I would fail and that’s why I’ve never tried.

I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all. And I look back across that gulf, not with a sense of guilt or loss, but with relief and satisfaction. Am I better than they are? Certainly not, although maybe luckier. But I am different, and I don’t understand them very well, and I can’t live with them or draw them into my inner world – or for that matter write about them. All my filial duties are nothing but a series of rituals on my part designed to shield myself from criticism while giving nothing of myself away.

One doesn’t think of you as a corporeal being really, but as a beam of pure intellect. And how I wish I had a little more of your radiance illuminating my life at the moment.

If he’s nice to you I will approve of him unconditionally, and if he’s not then I’ll be his enemy forever.

Or is it just that the pain I feel right now is so intense that it transcends my ability to reconstruct the pain I felt at the time? Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse – we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing

it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth

He carried her boxes of books from the back of his car and said proudly: The weight of your brain.

I’ve been thinking lately about right-wing politics (haven’t we all), and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism. The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions. What could be ‘conservative’ about such a process? But it also strikes me that the idea of ‘conservatism’ is in itself false, because nothing can be conserved, as such – time moves in one direction only, I mean. This idea is so basic that when I first thought of it, I felt very brilliant, and then I wondered if I was an idiot. But does it make some sense to you? We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way. Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ – but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to. I suppose you think this is all extremely rudimentary and maybe even that I’m un-dialectical. But these are just the abstract thoughts I had, which I needed to write down, and of which you find yourself the (willing or unwilling) recipient

You should know that our correspondence is my way of holding on to life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my – otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless – existence on this rapidly degenerating planet …

Syrina Akbari

One of the problems is that Dublin is, and I mean literally and figuratively, flat

Celina Irena Kuhn

If god wanted me to give you Up, He wouldn't have made me who I am.

Elise Rosa Cornelis

These hands touching you now, I use them to pack boxes?

Dare I say her best book , I loved it so so so muchhh

I think the writing is very honest with very interesting perspectives. However, I sort of feel it lacks depth and quite frankly, pretty vague scenarios in most parts where you’d want more, so plenty of ‘take it as you will’ moments. 

Ariariari

Güzel Dünya, Neredesin

cok akillica yazilmis, demodelik tasiyor bu yuzden. 

ceren koc

cok akillica yazilmis, demodelik tasiyor bu yuzden. 

(ve bir normal people degil)

Katherin 

I actually didn't finish this, my ghost did, because when I got to the part where Eileen says "lately I've been thinking about the collapse of the bronze age" I hurled myself off the nearest bridge

Regan Martin

Gdzie jesteś, piękny świecie

Maja

Maureen

"my problem is that I'm annoyed at everyone else for not having all the answers, when I also have none. And who am I to ask for humility and openness from other people? What have I ever given the world to ask so much in return?"

"If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn't have made
me who I am." (!!!)

***

Her BEST novel yet imo. Toward the end, I had been set on rating this 4 stars... but the last part changed my mind. She definitely poured her heart into writing this bc Alice and Felix; Eileen and Simon >>>> all her other characters. 

Sally Rooney just gets me—realistically speaking, I’ve never related more to a fictional character than I do with all 4 of them 🥹 (adulting-wise). She gathered all my anxieties and put them on paper—hence, the 5 stars.

Katerina

Deep, intellectual, thought-provoking, and mature. 

“Beautiful World, Where Are You?” is about two best friends, who go by their lives physically separated from one another but deeply connected emotionally. Throughout the book, they share email correspondences that let us have a peek into their worldview and their most cherished thoughts. And as they both go by their normal, ordinary lives, we get to witness a portion of it and experience every insight, every pain. 

What always amazes me about Sally Rooney is how she masterfully portrays the silence and things unsaid. Miscommunication seems to be something she always explores in her work. The characters are flawed and real. Much like “Normal People”, this book was extremely raw, cutting to humans’ deepest desires. 

At times I felt I loved this book more than anything else I’ve read from Sally Rooney. Yes, only at times. It often left me staying up and wondering — about the world, about love, about ourselves, about politics and I think, most of all, it left me wondering about friendship. The true one, the one that doesn’t ask or require, the one that waits patiently and never gets old. Perhaps I loved it most because of this.

Because, as much as Rooney explores Marxism, socialism, art, God, past and present, the main subject in “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is relationships. What we always go back to, no matter what happens. Primitive, yes, but most of all - human. 

Masterfully written to the last detail, “Beautiful World, Where Are You” got me in a storm of existential thoughts. What more is there to ask for?

Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world? 

Yes, they did! They found their own lil beautiful world. I love Alice and Eileen's friendship so much. I also found their emails to each other very interesting. They're like two of my personalities. 

I, of course, loved this too because of the writing. If Sally Rooney have zero fans, I'm dead. I want this book to have an adaptation too btw like normal people and cwf. So the SCU is complete and i can edit them lol.

Anyways, it shouldn't have took me this long to read this book but uni life just fucks with me right now, i just really want this to be on my February reads so i squeezed in some reading time. Truly so many books to read, so little time :((

Sajiya Chaudhary

I started 2021 with Normal People, and couldn't get over the book. Marianne and Connell, their relationship, anxieties, and finally understanding each other, and themselves. 
BWWAY is, I guess, her take on what the world went through in past two years, and the whole world had a reawakening. People realised that happiness didn't come from staying at home, alone, away, cut off from the world. But from the ordinary routine, meeting the same set of people each day, looking forward to the weekend, and other seemingly mundane stuff. And here Rooney tries to say this but with the help of Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix, who are all trying to understand their place in this world, in each other's lives, in their own bodies. 
Her writing style is unique - a lot of people don't like that she doesn't use quotation marks, which is fine by me. I feel much more connected to her words. The beginning might not make any sense at first, but it gets better with the pages passing, the characters start to become familiar with each other and one by one the layers starts coming off. And I started to relate more and more to all of them together. 
With every book I sort of remember the story - what happened and then what happened- there are few characters I fall in love with, but with Rooney, I remember the characters, their many flaws, and just their presence in myself. I recognise myself in so many of her creations.

warm, beautiful, gives me hope in a miserable world

Chris Dailey

Deliberate pacing and seemingly intentional shockless plot produce an insightful look at deep friendships and new encounters as a group of Irish Millennials navigate the current sense of dread and melancholy affecting their nation and generation. Ostensibly about two sets of couples that fumble and trip into loving partnerships, the story is more about the challenges of forming a new idea of success both personally and professionally - one that is profoundly separate from their parent's. Full of Rooney's typically blunt, yet sensual sexuality and tell-tale signs of 2020 - the dots on a texting iPhone, mentions of the pandemic, the novel is at it's best when it's capturing the back and forth of people trying to find their way. A bit high-brow at times and unconvincingly at that, the story succeeds in painting the duality of being anxious on a macro level, but satisfied personally. This is a highly readable mediation on modern love, friendship, careerism, and anxiety.

Here is the extraordinary, thrilling new novel from Sally Rooney, author of the internationally bestselling Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Beautiful World, Where Are You tells the story of Alice and Eileen, two best friends approaching their thirties, and on very different trajectories. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Italy 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 have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships 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?

Gelaine Trinidad

Sohini Roy

This was an interesting read- as is typical of a Rooney novel, we experience the thoughts, lives, and pretentiousness of young people in Dublin trying to figure out their personal relationships. Yet, as predictable as the synopsis of her novels come to be, they always hit home and make me feel deeply for the characters. I think this is the first novel of hers I've read that seems to end happily though- some parts of it were a bit slow, such as the randomized (maybe supposed to be insightful, but felt kind of useless) content of Alice and Eileen's emails, but overall a thought-provoking read. Several parts of it were annotation-worthy and I resisted the urge to highlight my library book. I think my favorite quote of all was "I feel so frightened of being hurt- not the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of suffering, the indignity of being open".

Abbie Duggan

I’m continually amazed at how little Sally Rooney has to say in order to deeply understand her characters. Rooney’s writing has been criticized for being about “nothing” with conversations that feel awkward and empty. But that’s exactly what makes me fall in love with her stories—they are complex in their simplicity, and isn’t that life itself?

This book is about relationships, as her other books are, but what struck me the most with this novel is the dialogue on relationship to self. As Alice and Eileen navigate through their opinions on climate change, religion, sex, and friendship, through their romantic relationships and perceived successes and failures, what they are really analyzing is the world and their place in it.

Messy, complicated, frustrating… this novel is a stunning portrait of the search for self in this beautiful world. Five stars, as my love for Rooney’s writing holds strong.

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 breakup, 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 have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships 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?

Andrea Morales

not my favorite sally rooney, not my favorite novel. frustrating at times and confusing till the end, beautiful world i’ve found you and i’m not sure how to feel about you.

armoni mayes

This may be my favorite Rooney novel, although I have not read CWF, so the jury is still out. Beautiful World, Where Are You had me in a chokehold, so much so that I returned it as a library book (~100 pages in) and decided I must own a copy of it. Of course, like Normal People, this book is a character study with somewhat of a plot, which I personally do enjoy reading. 

BWWAY follows four adults in their late 20s and early 30s named Simon, Eileen, Alice, and Felix as they navigate through our current society (HUGE TW for speaking of the pandemic. It was on the last few pages but honestly jarring nonetheless). This book devels into topics such as friendship, young love, miscommunication, class, how happiness is achieved, and so much more. I definitely identified with Eileen, as far as her emails are concerned, to which she spoke about how we determine if we are a good person in society, her views on religion, and her fears when entering a romantic relationship. I also found Felix and Alice's dynamic to be...interesting to say the least. Felix seems to despise Alice, from her house, her fame, her fortune, and her intelligence but continues to see her. I wondered whether it was a form of self-hatred for him, or if he continued to see her to eventually tear her down so that she will be as miserable as him. 

Quotes that made me feel something: 

If I ever do get a hold of you, you won't need to tell me, he said. I'll know. But I'm not going to chase too much. I'll just stay where I am and see if you come to me.
Yes, that's what hunters do with deer, she said. Before they kill them. 

Maybe were just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.

Every subsequent hour since I saw him has been worse than the last. Or is it just that the pain I feel right now is so intense that it transcends my ability to re-construct the pain I felt at the time? Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse- we can't remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.

And frankly if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of human-kind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven't deserved this life or even enjoyed it.

elena vaamonde 

This is my second Sally Rooney book that I've read and I still cannot figure out if I like her writing or not. I've read Normal People and I really liked it, but there is something about this book that I just cannot decide if I liked it or not.

I believe that my problem with this book is that I felt like Sally Rooney felt like she was writing something revolutionary, with what Alice and Eileen would say to each other in the emails that they would send to each other. It felt like she was trying to be deep and philosophical but what was actually being said was not that. Especially in chapter 10 when Alice was writing to Eileen that she did not like contemporary books because the authors that write them write about "ordinary life" when in reality they nothing about it, because they are living in their own self absorbed world. While reading this paragraph, I was just thinking ... "is this not exactly what you are doing right now?". I cannot tell in reality if this was something done on purpose and Rooney is self aware and the irony was there, or if she really believes that she does not belong in the same category. The writing of some the dialogue just feels a bit pretentious, but I just can't tell if that is the point. If it is then it is a pretty good commentary on specifically this genre of books, but if not it feels just kind of snobby. But again she may be self aware so it is a commentary on that I genuinely do not know and love to find out.

I did like the characters. They were likable but also had their flaws that made you frustrated in their actions. Sometimes I felt like Felix and Eileen messing up their relationships with their love interests a lot, and in the same ways, so the story started getting just plain frustrating. But i understand that it was the point of the book somewhat. 

That being said, I am going to read one more Sally Rooney book to decide if I like her writing or not to break the tie.

i enjoyed this book soo much. love the characters, and love the mundaneness of the book. 

sneha

Alice meets Felix 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 have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships 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?

annoying book about even more annoying people with a lot of annoying details i didn’t care about and the ending that none of the characters deserved. 

obnoxious and fake deep. a real disappointment after reading and liking normal people.

also, felix needs to die. seriously. alice is not perfect but no one deserves that. he is an awful person to literally everyone; he’s self centred misogynistic asshole and no one does anything to even tell him something along the lines of “hey dude, how about you stop being emotionally abusive ass? just a thought.”

annoying book about even more annoying people with a lot of annoying details i didn’t care about and the ending that none of the characters deserved. 

obnoxious and fake deep. a real disappointment after reading and liking normal people.

also, felix needs to die. seriously. alice is not perfect but no one deserves that. he is an awful person to literally everyone; he’s self centred misogynistic asshole and no one does anything to even tell him something along the lines of “hey dude, how about you stop being emotionally abusive ass? just a thought.”

Elisavet Rozaki 

I love the way Sally Rooney writes and Normal People is a 5-star read for me. 

I thoroughly enjoyed Beautiful World, Where Are You but the characters were not as lovable and complex as Connell and Marianne of Normal People. Which is why I'm giving this four stars.

This book is proof that one author's book is not another's... I had loved Normal People, but this one was very disappointing and even difficult to finish. The epistolary conversations between the two female characters are a pompous display of culture that don't always add much to the story. If I hadn't known the author was a woman, I'd have thought the sex scenes were written by a man, so poorly written are they, and their redundancy has more to do with embarrassment than sensuality. The male characters are unfortunately not developed enough, even if they are interesting. In short, a failure on my part, I feel I've missed out on the book.

Eloïse 

arwen

covid rr . truly no one compares to simoneileen

A bit disappointed here. Maybe I heard far too much about this author… Apart from the email exchanges between Alice and Eileen, I couldn’t find interest in their relations with Felix and Simon. I find especially Eileen/Simon underdeveloped as characters, as individuals firstly, and as for their relation: I was 100% not into it.

The sex scenes are not very well written but very efficient to have me permanent rolling eyes, can’t explain why.

To me, the book is unbalanced : Alice and Felix are more interesting in their own ways, so that creates an impression of draft rather than a finished « product » (sorry: book). Not sure I will open « Normal people » now…

Barbara

A bit disappointed here. Maybe I heard far too much about this author… Apart from the email exchanges between Alice and Eileen, I couldn’t find interest in their relations with Felix and Simon. I find especially Eileen/Simon underdeveloped as characters, as individuals firstly, and as for their relation: I was 100% not into it.

The sex scenes are not very well written but very efficient to have me permanent rolling eyes, can’t explain why.

To me, the book is unbalanced : Alice and Felix are more interesting in their own ways, so that creates an impression of draft rather than a finished « product » (sorry: book). Not sure I will open « Normal people » now…

Beautiful World, Where Are You A Novel

Reviews

Highlights