What is Beautiful World, Where Are You about?

Beautiful World, Where Are You follows the lives of four major characters:

• Alice Kelleher: a novelist from Ireland
• Felix Brady: a warehouse worker and Alice’s lover
• Eileen Lydon: an editor for a magazine and Alice’s friend
• Simon Costigan: a refugee agency worker and Eileen’s crush from childhood

With these four characters, Rooney explores a generation as it turns 30. Each character, particularly old college friends Alice and Eileen, ask themselves important questions about how to live in a world rocked by ecological disaster and languishing under capitalist realism.

A lot of these broader social themes are communicated through emails between Alice and Eileen. Those serve as a backdrop to the satisfyingly exciting and frustrating twists to the love stories — complete with a lot of titillating intimacy.

Fundamentally, it is a novel about the anxieties and difficulties of building a life — made specific to the Millennials and Gen-Z set. That yearning at its core makes the struggles of the characters all-too relatable in the best way.

Is Beautiful World, Where Are You LGBTQ+ friendly?

Beautiful World, Where Are You has queer characters, but the story treats this as detail, rather than highlighting it as a central theme. The protagonist Alice and her lover Felix are both openly bisexual.

In that way, Rooney’s novel is not strictly about being queer, and even her queer characters are involved in heterosexual romances.

Is Beautiful World, Where Are You a good book?

If you enjoyed Rooney’s Normal People and Conversations With Friends, you will love Beautiful World, Where Are You. The novel runs on much the same kind of narrative that her previous books do, but now the characters are getting a little older.

Borrowing heavily from her personal experiences and point of view, Rooney has been touted as a leading voice of her generation (mainly younger Millennial and older Gen-Zer readers). And she lives up to that title well with this one.

In a bit of a departure, Rooney seems to be experimenting with more explorative prose, while still preferring raw and strikingly natural writing for her dialogue. It comes together to make her novels feel incredibly real, giving us intimate looks into people not so different from us.

If you love more speculative fiction, or want a structured plot that loops like a rollercoaster, this probably isn’t for you. But if you want to feel like a fly on the wall in the lives of people trying to figure out the same answers you are, this is a must read."