Beautiful World, Where Are You
Four friends in Ireland navigate love, ambition, and disillusionment through their relationships and long email exchanges.
Where Beautiful World, Where Are You keeps showing up
Three of our editors' lists feature this novel.
Also by Sally Rooney
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A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about Beautiful World, Where Are You
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Alice, a young novelist who has fled to a coastal Irish town after a breakdown, and her best friend Eileen, still in Dublin, write each other long emails while each of them begins something new with a man.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a standalone, but readers familiar with Normal People will recognize Sally Rooney's interests in working-class Irish characters, intellectual relationships, and politics. The cast is entirely new.
A television adaptation was announced in 2024 by the BBC and Hulu, following Rooney's previous Normal People and Conversations with Friends adaptations. As of 2025, the show is in development.
Beautiful World, Where Are You was written by Sally Rooney, published in 2021 by Einaudi.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is 352 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Beautiful World, Where Are You takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a standalone novel by Sally Rooney, not part of a series.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
