Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the best-selling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a breakup, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

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?

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

Epigraph from "My Vocation", by Natalia Ginzburg, from The Little Virtues. Copyright 1962, 1966, 1972, 1984, 1998, 2012, and 2015 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino. Originally published in Italian as Le Piccole Virtù. Translation copyright 1985 Dick Davis. First published in Great Britain in 1985 by Carcanet, Manchester.

Excerpt from "How to Get There", by Frank O’Hara, from Lunch Poems. Copyright 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of City Lights Books, citylights.com. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, The Modern Library, New York, copyright 1924.

Excerpt from The Waste Land, first published in 1922; copyright the Estate of T. S. Eliot. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.