In Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney takes on her most ambitious challenge yet: writing the whole world. Your book club questions whether she succeeds.

Book Summary

It’s hard to get what you want. Sally Rooney has written three novels. Conversations With Friends, her debut, was fought over by seven separate presses. Its successor, Normal People, won major awards and was adapted into a Hulu/BBC series. Now we’re at number three, and everyone already loves it, even as a hat.

These achievements don’t do justice to her skills. Rooney writes small details and sex scenes so well because as an artist she understands restraint perfectly. That’s why we keep coming back for more of these carnal, vulnerable, challenging, and contemplative Irish youths. Think of Connell’s chain.

For your book club, we might begin by suggesting Beautiful World is Rooney coming to grips with the wild success, and aesthetic power, of her previous work. What should she do now, as an artist people listen to and take seriously? And what “people” are they? Where are they from? How seriously do they take her, or are they just here to say they read Sally Rooney? And what are the limitations of a voice, a method, an identity based in understatement?

Flattery and appearances all play a huge role in Beautiful World. So do major global issues, what the novel itself calls “general systems collapse.” Alice worries about “suppressing the truth of the world” beneath the “glittering surface” of her texts. Critics have called Rooney’s topics limited; Eileen, another character in Beautiful World, can’t believe she’s still talking about “sex and friendship” when so much is going wrong. Our guiding question, therefore, is:

Given that it understands its limitations, what does Beautiful World feel a responsibility to do?

Let our Beautiful World, Where Are You discussion questions below help guide you to an answer.

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Beautiful World, Where Are You Book Club Questions PDF