Beautiful world, where are you?

Life seems to have stagnated, with no future in sight.
If failure is ubiquitous, then what is the meaning of life?
If one is incapable of making oneself happy, how can one envision a beautiful world?

On the brink of anxiety, rediscovering a desire for life.

It is "resonance" that makes us long to be close to each other.
This is my world, my one and only life.

Named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2022—
Sally Rooney's latest novel since "Normal People"

"Sally Rooney's best work yet." — The New York Times

★Debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, sweeping bestseller lists worldwide
★2021 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction
★Special recommendation by Professor Tseng Li-Ling of National Taiwan University's Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
★Includes a special feature — an interview with Sally Rooney

Novelist Alice meets warehouse worker Felix through a dating app and invites him to Rome with her. Her best friend, Eileen, an editor at a literary magazine in Dublin, starts dating her childhood friend Simon after recovering from a breakup.

Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young, but reality relentlessly pursues them. They long for each other yet hurt one another. They worry about love and sex, about friendship, and about the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lit room before a vast darkness, about to witness a major transformation? Do they still believe in the existence of a beautiful world?

"Anything can make me cry," in reality, I think I'm very unhappy.

Does anyone in this world rely on me for anything?
Turns out my loneliness and unhappiness are not unique at all.

The book begins with Alice deciding to move out of Dublin. Is leaving friends and family and moving to a seaside village really the "right" decision? As friends who have known each other since university, they now maintain their intellectual friendship through email correspondence. When and how they will meet again takes on disproportionate importance as the plot unfolds, influencing the destinies of the four young people in the book, who are about to turn thirty, as they ponder where and how to live their lives. This novel is about choices, about how to create one's own life, which is a consequence of their love, friendship, and self-awareness.

"I think love is the primary engine of my novels. It's still possible to create interesting work from the perspective of love. Love and friendship are topics worth exploring for a lifetime." — Sally Rooney

The title comes from a line by the 18th-century German poet Schiller, where "where are you" echoes the Latin "ubi sunt" — meaning "where are they" tradition. "Beautiful World" also implies disillusionment with the current and ideal world, from political situations to climate change, from economic to the complete collapse of civilization and language. No matter how intellectual the protagonists are, they must endure everything, feeling utterly powerless about worldly changes, even feeling that they are the ones preventing themselves from being happy. If so, why should people work? What is the meaning of sex, love, and friendship? Can people today still believe in the existence of a beautiful world?

"I don't know."
The work of assigning meaning is yet to be done. New things will continue to happen.

Heralded as the voice of the millennial generation, Sally Rooney never shies away from writing about the world she knows, basing her stories on real daily life to express her thoughts on the world. She precisely captures the delicate sensitivities of the younger generation and the deeper things hidden beneath the surface of life, such as intimate relationships. After "Normal People" sparked a global "Rooney-mania," this new book once again swept the literary world with overwhelming acclaim upon its publication.

The easiest way to live life is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.
In real life, besides yourself, have you ever cared for anyone else?
What is the work you live by, the only thing you want to do? Who makes you happy to be with?

Perhaps we are born to love and worry about the people we know,
and even if there are more important things to do, we continue to love and worry.

Otherwise, what else is worth living for?