This September, Sally Rooney’s third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You will be released. After the immense success of Normal People and Conversations with Friends, it is an understatement to say that there is hype around the book. Coming up to the release date, many book-obsessed YouTubers were giving their spoiler-free reviews to build up excitement. They had to keep the plot details such a secret, they even had to sign non-disclosure agreements promising not to leak anything.
If you’ve spent the last couple of years living under a rock, you may be asking yourself many questions, like, who is Sally Rooney? What is so great about these “normal people” and why on earth is everyone thirsting over Connell’s chain? Don’t worry, I am here to break it down.
Rooney is an acclaimed novelist who skyrocketed to fame when the adaptation of her second novel Normal People was released on the small screen. When lockdown was well and truly underway and people all over the world were looking for something to binge-watch, this smash hit put her work on the map, with Trinity alum Paul Mescal even winning a BAFTA for his performance as Connell Waldron. The show has even become incredibly popular with celebrities such as Kourtney Kardashian and Katy Perry. Although she did co-write the screenplay of Normal People, you are doing yourself an injustice by just watching the show without reading Rooney’s original work.
The reason why Rooney’s books are so outrageously popular is because she transports you to a stream of consciousness where you read from the perspective of one character, then another. This back and forth continues throughout the course of her novels. A lot of love stories about young people in modern films and literature are rash and unrealistic; particularly stories published in the last decade where relationships can be summed up in a few Tinder messages. Young people are portrayed (usually by people a lot older than them) as people constantly in a rush. Everything is happening so quickly that they only have one night or a week to explore a love story.
Rooney, by contrast, takes her time. She is in no rush to convince you that her characters love each other, or connect with each other in some way. She lets the love story flow until you realise how much these characters have developed. As characters grow before your eyes, it’s as if you have known them for years, despite only having been with them for a short time. You are transported into real-life Irish experiences when reading her books. You feel like you’ve been to school with her characters, or sat next to them in a lecture. They are incredibly human; none of them are perfect, and some have more flaws than others.
Her books have become social media’s “it bag”. In the nineties and noughties, if you had one of these “it bags”, say a Birkin bag or Fendi ‘baguette’, you knew your stuff when it came to fashion and you wanted people to know it. Now, in the literary world, people are collecting Rooney’s books like the “it bags” of the past: her novels are becoming the “it book” for trendy people on social media. You cannot look at modern bookshelves on Instagram or scroll through TikTok without seeing her books show up at some stage.
I have no doubt that Beautiful World, Where Are You, will live up to the hype. In July, Rooney published an excerpt of the book in the New Yorker that introduces the relationship between two of the main characters, Eileen and Simon. Resembling Connell and Marianne in ways, their paths have crossed over a period of time, with both characters knowing different versions of each other. In the excerpt, Rooney is doing what she does best. She allows you into the mindset of her characters effortlessly, as their conscious thoughts and dialogue intertwine in an incredibly naturalistic way. Upon the advent of her third novel, we have no idea where the story may turn.
As the novel hits shelves on September 7th, head out to your local bookshop to find out more and enjoy what I’m sure will be another impressive piece of work from one of our own.
