They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young-but life is catching up with them. 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. Beautiful World, Where Are You SummaryĪlice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. Written in her signature thoughtful and perceptive prose, in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney tackles everything from privilege to class divide, to society’s definition of success to how one finds hope in a seemingly despondent world, to deliver perhaps her best book yet. RELATED: Desert Island Books: Tobias Madden And what follows is an intimate exploration of the inane and imperfect of the ebbs and flows of the mundane and the ordinary as the characters search for the profound and the beautiful in their everyday encounters. An absolute treat of a read, and one that offered me a much-needed dose of escapism from the sunny streets of Bondi to a rickety farmhouse in Ireland, and the cobbled streets of Rome in Beautiful World, Where Are You we follow Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon as they navigate the intricacies and nuances of blossoming relationships and long-held friendships.Īlice – a successful novelist who has found both fame and critical acclaim at quite a young age – meets warehouse worker Felix on a dating app after returning to Ireland from New York while her close friend Alice begins a romantic liaison with Simon, who she’s known since she was a baby. While words don’t quite adequately convey my utter adoration for Rooney’s books, I can but try to explain just how much I loved Beautiful World, Where Are You. Beautiful World, Where Are You Book Review

And so, as soon as I got my hands on a copy, I cleared the reading schedule, left my phone in another room, and lost myself between the pages of Beautiful World, Where Are You. That it was being published during Sydney’s lockdown made it all the sweeter. And thus, it was with great delight that I discovered that Rooney – the thirty-year-old Irish writer who can do no wrong in the eyes of the literary world – had a new book coming out. Like most other readers around the world, I absolutely devoured both Normal People and Conversations with Friends, before going on to binge watch the TV adaptation of Normal People, and – like much of the female population of the world – becoming somewhat obsessed with Conor’s silver chain.

Review of beautiful world where are you