Preview
  • Beautiful World, Where Are You

  • By: Sally Rooney
  • Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
  • Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (26 ratings)

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Beautiful World, Where Are You

By: Sally Rooney
Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
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Publisher's summary

#1 INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

ONE OF TIME'S MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2021

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY BUZZFEED, ESQUIRE, THE GUARDIAN, KIRKUS REVIEWS AND FINANCIAL TIMES

Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s best novel yet. Funny and smart, full of sex and love and people doing their best to connect.” —The New York Times

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 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?

©2021 Sally Rooney (P)2021 Knopf Canada
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Critic reviews

“Fans of Rooney’s previous work will relish the ache and uncertainty of her characters’ coming of age, her way with emotional difficulty and her brilliance in showing the barriers we put between ourselves and the love of others. The last third of Beautiful World, Where Are You, when the four characters meet and connect, is a tour de force. The dialogue never falters, and the prose burns up the page. It takes some time to get these people in the same room, however, and that movement towards intimacy is purposely delayed by Rooney’s descriptive prose, which heats up slowly.” —Anne Enright, The Guardian

“Extremely well-written longing. Three novels in, and it’s still what Rooney does best: ensnare us over and over in the jet-fueled heat between good-looking (and supernaturally articulate) Irish youths . . . Each sentence builds like a brushstroke: on its own, any particular line can seem pedestrian. Assembled together, we get whole scenes of otherwise banal parties and bus rides, glances cast and bodies rearranged, all rendered to a storybook-like effect.” —Delia Cai, Vanity Fair

"[Rooney’s] writing about sex is taut and direct. It’s a narrative style I associate with the films of Andrew Haigh and Joanna Hogg, two great visual poets of social anxiety and reticence. Rooney’s dialogue is frequently perfect . . . Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s best novel yet. Funny and smart, full of sex and love and people doing their best to connect.” —Brandon Taylor, The New York Times Book Review

What listeners say about Beautiful World, Where Are You

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Man or woman?

... the 'voice' was somehow disappointing ... I felt a lot of the time that the POV was male, particularly the dynamic of the sex encounters and the hyperwokeness of the men ... these men were not likely on type for someone wondering where this beautiful world is hiding. Almost in plain sight it seems, esp as both men hung in there through difficult stretches.

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