Author | Sally Rooney |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Faber and Faber; Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | 7 September 2021 |
Preceded by | Normal People |
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a novel by Irish author Sally Rooney. It was released on 7 September 2021. [1] [2] [3] The book was a New York Times and IndieBound bestseller. [4]
The work tells the story of Alice Kelleher, an Irish novelist, and her best friend Eileen Lydon, an editor at a literary magazine. In alternating chapters are descriptions of their lives and emails they send each other. The two other important characters are Kelleher's new lover Felix Brady, who works at a warehouse, and Lydon's friend Simon Costigan, who works for a refugee agency. [3] [5] In The Guardian , Anthony Cummins describes the novel's structure as a "love quadrangle" between Kelleher and Brady, on the one hand; and Lydon and Costigan, on the other. [6]
Beautiful World's themes include romance, friendship, precarity, and social class. [7] The title comes from a poem by Friedrich Schiller which Franz Schubert set to music in 1819. [3] [8] The novel includes substantial epistolary elements, such as emails between Kelleher and Lydon. [9]
Before Beautiful World's release in September 2021, advance copies circulated on the internet; one sold on eBay for over US$200. [10] On the day it was released, Beautiful World was a bestseller on Amazon. [1] In anticipation of its release, Rooney's American publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux distributed branded merchandise, including bucket hats and tote bags, to influencers. [11] The first edition of Beautiful World was illustrated by Manshen Lo, and designed by Jon Gray. [12] [13]
Beautiful World was published by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom, [14] by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States, [11] and by Knopf Canada in Canada. [15] Rooney rejected an offer from Modan, an Israeli publisher, to sell Hebrew-language translation rights due to her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, preferring to sell Hebrew rights in a way that complies with the BDS movement guidelines. [16] [17] Steimatzky and Tzomet Sfarim, two Israeli bookstore chains, stopped selling Rooney's work following her decision. [18]
Beautiful World, Where Are You was a New York Times and IndieBound bestseller. [4]
It received positive reviews from Slate, [19] the New York Times, [20] [21] The Times, [22] The Irish Times , [23] The Atlantic, [24] NPR, [8] [25] Financial Times , [26] the Harvard Review , [27] the Washington Post , [28] the New Yorker , [29] USA Today , [30] Vox, [31] The New Zealand Herald , [32] The Boston Globe, The Sydney Morning Herald, [33] The Guardian , [34] [35] and InStyle . [36] The book also received starred reviews from Booklist , [37] [38] Library Journal, [39] Publishers Weekly, [40] and Kirkus. [4]
The book received mixed reviews from Columbia Journal, [41] Air Mail , [42] Brooklyn Mail, The New Republic, [43] the Los Angeles Times , [44] The Wall Street Journal , [45] Star Tribune , [46] Entertainment Weekly, [47] The Economist, [48] New Statesman, [49] The Observer, The Independent, [50] The Nation, [51] Vulture, [52] and The i . [53] Open Letters Review and the London Review of Books [54] reviewed it negatively.
Brandon Taylor described Beautiful World as Rooney's "best novel yet" in a review for The New York Times , while expressing some concern that the novel lacks substantive political or moral critique. [21] Reviewing the novel in Jacobin, Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino agreed that Beautiful World does not offer clear solutions to the social problems of late capitalism that it addresses, but argues that it is not the responsibility of fiction to provide such solutions. [55] In a four-star review for Vox , Constance Grady argued that Beautiful World investigates questions with which Rooney's fiction has been consistently preoccupied: "As the world collapses all around us, is it morally defensible to devote your life to love, relationships, and the aesthetic pleasure of books? What if you get rich from it?" [56]
Year | Award | Result | Cite |
---|---|---|---|
2021 | Irish Book Awards: Novel of the Year | Winner | [57] |
Goodreads Choice Awards: Best Fiction | Winner | [58] | |
Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2021 | Selection | [4] | |
2022 | Dalkey Literary Awards: Novel of the Year | Winner | [59] |
Jeanette Winterson is an English author. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. She broadcasts and teaches creative writing. She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She has received an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Catherine Chidgey is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer and university lecturer. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize ; the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on two occasions; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize.
Charlotte Sally Potter is an English film director and screenwriter. She is best known for directing Orlando (1992), which won the audience prize for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival.
Sally Cecilia Hawkins is an English actress who began her career on stage and then moved into film. She has received several awards including a Golden Globe Award in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards and two British Academy Film Awards.
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.
Damon Galgut is a South African novelist and playwright. He was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise, having previously been shortlisted for the award in 2003 and 2010.
Cheryl Strayed is an American writer and podcast host. She has written four books: the novel Torch (2006) and the nonfiction books Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Tiny Beautiful Things (2012) and Brave Enough (2015). Wild, which told the story of a long hike that Strayed took in 1995, was an international bestseller, and was adapted as the 2014 Academy Award-nominated film Wild.
Jessie Buckley is an Irish actress and singer. The recipient of a Laurence Olivier Award, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award and three BAFTA Awards, she was listed at number 38 on The Irish Times' list of Ireland's greatest film actors of all time, in 2020. In 2019, she was recognised by Forbes in its annual 30 Under 30 list.
Nikita Lalwani FRSL is a novelist born in Kota, Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff, Wales.
Donal Ryan is an Irish writer. He has published six novels and one short story collection. In 2016, novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry described Ryan in The Guardian newspaper as "the king of the new wave of Irish writers". All of his novels have been number one bestsellers in Ireland.
Elizabeth Day is an English novelist, journalist and broadcaster. She was a feature writer for The Observer from 2007 to 2016, and wrote for You magazine. Day has written six books, and is also the host of the podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day.
Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for The London Review of Books.
Sally Rooney is an Irish author and screenwriter. She has published three novels: Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). The former two were adapted into the television miniseries Normal People (2020) and Conversations with Friends (2022).
Conversations with Friends is the 2017 debut novel by the Irish author Sally Rooney, about two young women who become involved with an older couple in Dublin's literary scene. The novel was published by Faber and Faber and received critical acclaim. A television adaptation, also called Conversations with Friends, was released in 2022.
Normal People is a 2018 novel by the Irish author Sally Rooney. Normal People is Rooney's second novel, published after Conversations with Friends (2017). It was first published by Faber & Faber on 30 August 2018. The book became a best-seller in the US, selling almost 64,000 copies in hardcover in its first four months of release. A critically acclaimed and Emmy nominated television adaptation of the same name aired from April 2020 on BBC Three and Hulu. A number of publications ranked it one of the best books of the 2010s.
Normal People is an Irish romantic psychological drama limited series produced by Element Pictures for BBC Three and Hulu in association with Screen Ireland. It is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Sally Rooney. The series follows the relationship between Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron, as they navigate adulthood from their final days in secondary school to their undergraduate years in Trinity College. The series was primarily written by Rooney and Alice Birch and directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald.
Alice Birch is a British playwright and screenwriter. Birch has written several plays, including Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. for which she was awarded the George Devine Award for Most Promising New Playwright, and Anatomy of a Suicide for which she won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Birch was also the screenwriter for the film Lady Macbeth and has written for such television shows as Succession, Normal People, and Dead Ringers.
Naoise Dolan is an Irish novelist. She is known for her novels Exciting Times (2020), and The Happy Couple (2023).
Conversations with Friends is an Irish television serial based on the 2017 novel of the same name by the Irish author Sally Rooney. Developed by Element Pictures for BBC Three and Hulu in association with RTÉ, it is the second adaptation by this crew of a Rooney novel after Normal People in 2020. Conversations with Friends was first broadcast on 15 May 2022. The series received generally favourable reviews with praise for the performance of lead cast and aesthetics.
The Man Who Died Twice is a crime novel written by the British comedian and presenter Richard Osman. It was published by Penguin Random House's Viking Press in September 2021 and is the sequel to The Thursday Murder Club.