Beautiful World, Where Are You, the third novel from Sally Rooney, author of the internationally bestselling Normal People and Conversations with Friends, will be published by Knopf Canada on September 7, 2021.
Lynn Henry, Knopf Canada’s Publishing Director, acquired Canadian and audio rights in a two-book deal from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. Faber will publish the novel in the UK, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in the US.
Beautiful World, Where Are You tells the story of Alice and Eileen, two best friends on very different trajectories. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse. Eileen, getting over a break-up, slips back into flirting with old friend Simon. 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 worry about sex, friendship and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Lynn Henry says: “Beautiful World, Where Are You is extraordinary—electric in its minute observation of our multi-layered society; compassionate yet unblinkingly accurate in its portrayal of the four characters at its heart; and not afraid to ask fundamental questions about life. The novel is a revelation, and all of us at Knopf Canada are enormously delighted to be working with Sally Rooney again.”
Martha Kanya-Forstner, Knopf Canada’s newly appointed publisher says: “Reading Beautiful World, Where Are You was one of the very first things I did in my new role. The novel is astonishingly good, and made my heart ache even as it thrilled me with its insights into desire, beauty, art, power, friendship and love. I cannot imagine a more exciting welcome into a job than the announcement of a new novel from Sally Rooney.”
Knopf Canada will publish Beautiful World, Where Are You in hardcover ($29.95), eBook, and audio editions.
Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People. She was the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. In 2018, Conversations with Friends was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and Normal People was the Waterstones Book of the Year, won the Costa Novel Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Rooney won the Encore Award for Normal People in 2019. She was the editor of the Stinging Fly in 2018 and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library from 2019–20. She was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the television adaptation of Normal People, which was broadcast on CBC Gem in 2020.
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