Third novel from Normal People author Sally Rooney to be released this year
Sally Rooney. Picture: Kalpesh Lathigra
Fans of Sally Rooney can rejoice as it has been confirmed her third novel is set to be published later this year.
Beautiful World, Where Are You will be published by Faber & Faber on September 7. It follows Alice and Eileen, best friends nearing their 30s in different places and on very different trajectories.
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Announcing Sally Rooney’s new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You.
— Faber Books (@FaberBooks) January 12, 2021
Publishing 7 September 2021. #BWWAY pic.twitter.com/b3lG4ztcgY
Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships 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?
It will be her third novel, following the successful Normal People in 2018 and her 2017 debut, Conversations with Friends.
“Sally’s new novel is a book of friendship and sex, art and faith, power and love,” said Alex Bowler, the publisher at Faber & Faber who acquired the novel as part of a two-book deal.
“It absorbs you once again in the inner lives of characters with brilliant minds and aching hearts, while marking the next creative leap from a singular writer. The book scintillates with intelligence, empathy and, yes, beauty.”
Normal People was the seventh highest-selling book in Ireland last year, with more than 40,000 copies sold, while Conversations with Friends was the 19th most popular, with 22,135 sales. In Britain, Normal People was the 16th highest-selling book last year.
Following its release in 2018, Normal People was the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Interest in Rooney’s work peaked with the broadcasting of the television adaptation of Normal People, co-directed by Lenny Abrahamson, last year. Rooney, who turns 30 next month, was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the show which catapulted its young stars, Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, to international fame.
A television adaptation of Conversations with Friends is also planned.
