Beautiful World, Where Are You

#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?

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.