Beautiful World, Where Are You

Beautiful World, Where Are You came out on 7 September 2021, and it was a best-seller in the United States on both the New York Times and IndieBound lists. Advance copies had been circulating online before publication, and one is reported to have sold on eBay for more than two hundred dollars.

Its two central figures are Alice Kelleher, a novelist, and Eileen Lydon, whose job is editing at a literary magazine and who has been her closest friend since they were young. The narrative moves between the two of them, and between those chapters it gives the emails they send each other, so a good deal of the book is carried on in letters.

Two other people matter to the story. Alice becomes involved with Felix Brady, who works in a warehouse, and Eileen's long friendship with Simon Costigan, a policy adviser, takes a turn of its own. Around those relationships the novel thinks about romance, friendship, the uncertainty of work and money, and social class; the title is borrowed from a Schiller poem that Schubert set to music in 1819.