Beautiful World, Where Are You

Alice Kelleher is a young Irish novelist who, after the success of her books and a subsequent breakdown, has retreated to a large, half-empty house on the coast three hours from Dublin. There she meets Felix, a local man who works in a warehouse, and on impulse invites him to travel with her to Rome. Back in the city, her closest friend Eileen, an underpaid literary-magazine editor nursing the wounds of a breakup, drifts back toward Simon, a slightly older man she has known and loved, on and off, since childhood.

Across alternating chapters, Rooney follows these four as they circle intimacy, work, faith, and the future, and interleaves the narrative with long, searching emails between Alice and Eileen. In those letters the two women argue about beauty, politics, the collapse of civilization, and whether it is possible to live a good life, and love anyone honestly, in a world that feels as though it is ending.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a quieter, more essayistic novel than Rooney's earlier work, pairing her precise attention to sex and desire with an openly philosophical restlessness. It is a book about millennials trying to figure out what they owe each other and the world, and whether ordinary happiness is enough.