Published by Faber & Faber on September 7th

Available from West End Lane Bookshop,

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What They Say

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?

What I Say

Because in my deepest essence I am just an artefact of our culture, just a little bubble winking at the brim of our civilisation. And when it’s gone, I’ll be gone. Not that I think I mind.

I never thought that being in possession of a book would be so difficult. Over the past few weeks, as the publication of Sally Rooney’s latest novel has come closer and closer, social media has become filled with many different opinions both of this novel and the marketing surrounding it.

I was even hesitant to post a picture of my copy because there seems to be such a complicated and intricate discourse about it, and in doing so am I now making myself part of that too?

I thought long and hard about this post, because my commitment to you in having Years of Reading Selfishly is to be honest about what I am reading. If I love it, I tell you all about it, if I don’t then I choose not to review it.

This is what is at the heart of the discussion for me. I am coming to this novel not as some puppet in a marketing strategy, but purely and simply as a reader, the person who ultimately when all the noise has stopped, picks up a book and reads it. If that novel doesn’t connect with me or it’s not for me, then that’s fine – you can’t love everything you read, and we can’t all like the same books. If however I loved it, and I know lots of you will too, of course I want to tell you about it because I want you to share that experience, for us to be able to talk about books in a positive and intelligent way.

If you want to read what I thought, then this is the post for you.

I read and loved both of Sally’s previous novels. When it comes to Beautiful World, Where Are You?, we again meet a group of people, all of whom have their own flaws and insecurities, and the fact that they are at a pivotal point in their lives where they have the opportunity to make certain choices.

This novel is about three friends. Alice, Eileen, and Simon, and Felix who has just met Alice. While Alice, Simon and Eileen have know each other for a long time, Alice met Felix on a dating app, and whilst their first date was filled with promise but ended with miscommunication, the second date where they spend time together ends up with Alice asking Felix to travel to Rome with her as she promotes her latest novel.

Alice is a very successful writer, and I feel that she is used as Rooney’s mouthpiece to tell us what it’s really like to be her – to deal with the expectations and pressures of being feted and adored on one hand, and then having everyone just waiting for you to fail on the other. She makes lots of observations about the realities of being a writer who has success, and the unfounded preconceptions people have about you and your writing. Alice also shows us how when you are doing all the book promotion and marketing, that you are doing what is required of you as oppose to being free to do what you really love – which is writing.

Felix works in a warehouse, and although surprised by Alice’s invitation, he is intrigued by her and accepts. They don’t know each other at all, but undoubtedly right from the start there is something between them, and the tension is palpable as they visit Rome, seeing each other at their most vulnerable but also trying to maintain the facade the other expects. Little by little they edge closer together and Felix starts to understand what life is like for Alice and they start to be more open with each other.

Eileen and Alice have been friends for a long time, and after Eileen’s relationship with her boyfriend Aidan ends, she sees her long standing friend Simon in a new light. They realise that they are absolutely attracted to each other, and the familiarity and sense of comfort they find in each other seems natural and a perfect fit. Their relationship is played out in front of us, and appears to be the one they both unquestionably need. I really loved this part of the story, because it seems so utterly obvious to the reader they belong together, and as the narrative progresses, you want them to see it too.

This novel moves between the two love stories and the long emails that Alice and Eileen send each other. In those correspondences, they both ponder their relationships, the world around them and the uncharted political and social landscape they find themselves in. At times I had to sit and reread paragraphs to make sure I fully appreciated what was being said, and that distanced me slightly from the flow of the narrative to be honest, but I felt it was a device that it gave me a deeper understanding of the characters outside of their love interests.

Rooney’s prose is straightforward and I suppose almost matter of fact in its execution, but it also feels real and I like all the intricate and precise details of their everyday lives. Life is not always about the huge gestures and the drama, more often than not it is about the routine and the mundane and the minutiae of sex and relationships. You want to find out what happens to all the characters because there is that sense of connection to them and I didn’t always like how they behaved, but at the same time Rooney makes you feel invested in them, and that’s what I want in a novel. When the four characters finally come together towards the end of the novel, it feels natural and engaging to see how they all interact.

Beautiful World, Where Are You? is a novel about people seeking connections with each other and our existence in a world that is rapidly changing in unexpected and surprising ways. The focus on the mundanity and often the surprises that each day bring, is written in an understated way that made me sit and think about things I recognise in the novel about myself too – like being in an art gallery and rushing to get to the toilets and ignoring all the great works of art to do so! I also think it is absolutely a novel that asks us to see that beyond the written word and acknowledge that behind it all there is a living breathing person who has emotions and feelings, and has to process what is said about her, when people don’t actually know her at all. How difficult must it be to simply sit and write, when the whole world seems to have an opinion about you based on what other people have written.

You may like this novel or you may not, and as a reader of course that is absolutely your prerogative. I will only say that in an ever more tense and emotionally charged world where social media reigns supreme, we are always telling each other to ‘be kind’, and perhaps that’s what we need to remember about everyone involved in the production of a novel, from Rooney herself to those who are working incredibly hard behind the scenes to tell us readers all about it. We need to understand that behind this novel is a person who just wants to write for her readers, and maybe that’s all we should be concerned with.

This reader loved it.

Thank you so much to Josh Smith at Faber Books for my gifted copy.

You can buy your copy from West End Lane Books here.