![]() ![]() Following the interwoven lives of friends Eileen, Alice, Simon, and Felix, the novel can be read as a long string of questions. Like Rooney’s previous novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People, Beautiful World explores relationships among Dublin’s bookish millennials. Rooney’s characters are haunted by self-doubt. In their correspondence, Christianity emerges as a potential path out of the disenchantment that permeates their lives. ![]() Encountering liturgy in the real world complicates Eileen’s understanding of Dublin as a post-Catholic city, shaping email exchanges with her friend Alice. Within the church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, she discovers living, breathing faith that transcends mere social ritual. In Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? twenty-nine-year-old Eileen attends mass and discovers a secret in plain view. Is it really possible I witnessed such a scene, right in the middle of Dublin, only a few hours ago? Is it possible such things literally go on, in the real world you and I both live in? ![]() Nora Kirkham considers how Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? encourages readers to seek out beauty and closer, richer relationships during times of ‘disenchantment and anxiety’, in the latest contribution to our series on “bingeing” the arts during the pandemic. ![]()
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