Good news for Hulu series producers, Shiv Roy, and people who have to find a birthday gift for their cool niece. Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s follow-up to Normal People and Conversations With Friends was announced today by publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Titled Beautiful World, Where Are You, the book finds Dublin friends Alice and Eileen, and their lovers Felix and Simon, on the precipice of being maybe actual adults. Also, Felix works in a warehouse, so he will most certainly be coded “very hot.†The publisher released a statement with the following synopsis:
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 break-up 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?
Beautiful World, Where Are You, is the first book in a two-book deal with FSG. It will be released on September 7, 2021. Plenty of time for the book club to get vaccinated.