For millennia, the Irish have been telling stories with insight and humour. Rooney proudly, confidently, continues that tradition. There is no better writer for creating believable characters and then stirring their emotions in a cauldron.

This novel focuses on four characters, two female and two male, paired into two on-and-off couples. Alice is a successful writer renting an old rectory by the sea three hours from Dublin. There she hooks up with Felix, a factory worker with no prior knowledge of Alice’s celebrity. Both he and Alice have fluid sexualities.

Alice’s college friend Eileen works for a literary magazine in Dublin and has had a lifelong relationship with Simon, who works as a refugee advocate. Their relationship has been mostly platonic but has become sexual on occasion. All have unhappy family histories (Anna Karenina is cited often).

The plot (Eileen and Simon are invited to Alice’s cottage) is merely a vehicle for seeing the characters develop and interact. Alice has suffered a psychiatric episode, from which she’s recovering; Eileen has an unfulfilled work and romantic life; Simon is emotionally closed off; but it’s the seemingly lesser character, Felix whose presence is felt most strongly. His character works like a court jester – not so much for the laughs, but for the permission to ask impertinent questions. He pokes an uncomfortable stick into the friendships between Alice and Eileen, Simon’s quiet Christianity and his relationship with Eileen.

As the four finally meet at the rectory, it’s like watching cars approach an intersection from all directions at speed … there will be pain and nothing will remain the same. And where is the beautiful world? Each has a version waiting inside them if only they would see it.

A magnificently rendered character study.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You. She was the winner of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. Normal People (‘the literary phenomenon of the decade’, Guardian) was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019, won the Costa Novel of the Year 2018 and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award 2019. Sally Rooney co-wrote the television adaptation of Normal People which was broadcast on the BBC in 2020.