Beautiful World, Where Are You is Irish author Sally Rooney’s third novel, published in September 2021. Not coincidentally, it is the story of an Irish novelist who bears a more than slight resemblance to her creator. The story covers the protagonist, Alice Kelleher, and her various interactions with her lover Felix, her best friend Eileen and Eileen’s childhood friend and on-again/off-again romantic partner Simon. In a much more accurate sense, however, it is the story of an intense and engaging ongoing online discourse between two highly intelligent women whom neither of the men in their lives are really deserving of.
Autobiographical assumptions are inevitable as Alice is, like her creator, a young writer who found met success very early in her career and at a very young age and who is finding that fame and success is definitely a double-edged sword. The romantic subplots take a definite backstage to fascinating email exchanges between the two women that cover a broad range of subjects and are interesting in themselves rather than for what they contribute to the narrative of what is essentially a plotless story.
Immediately upon release, Beautiful World, Where Are You became a commercial success, leaping to the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling mainstream fiction. The novel produced rave reviews in the New York Times and multiple other print and online publications and was seemingly destined to enjoy smooth sailing into the always unpredictably turbulent waters of end-of-the-year literary award contention just like her first two efforts, Conversations with Friends and Normal People. But a funny thing happened on the way to that plan.
About a month after the novel his bookstores, controversy erupted when it was disclosed that Rooney had refused to sell translations rights to an Israeli publisher in an expression of solidarity with a Palestinian rights movement organization known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) which seeks to gain momentum in political action against the Israeli government through economic sanctions. In the wake of this refusal, Israel’s two biggest bookstore chains—including the nation’s oldest—refused to sell any of Rooney’s works.
Despite the controversy, Beautiful World, Where are You was ultimately the big winner at the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards where it was honored as the Eason Novel of the Year. Notably, however, the book failed to be nominated for any of the major awards for which her first two novels had been recognized.
