‘Normal People’ Author Sally Rooney to Release New Novel in Fall

A new novel from Sally Rooney is coming.

The author behind bestsellers and acclaimed novels Normal People and Conversations with Friends is set to release her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You this fall, it was announced Tuesday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a division of Macmillan.

The novel will mark Rooney’s first since the success of the Normal People Hulu adaptation starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones. Following its 2018 release, Normal People was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, with Rooney appointed “the first great millennial novelist” by critics. Her 2017 novel Conversations With Friends is also now being adapted into a series by the same team behind Normal People‘s.

Both of Rooney’s first two novels have sold more than a million copies in the United States.

Her upcoming book will center on a novelist named Alice who asks a warehouse worker Felix to travel to Rome with her. Meanwhile, in Dublin, Alice’s best friend, Eileen, begins flirting with her childhood friend Simon while trying to get over a break-up. Readers will follow Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon as they navigate being young adults amid trying times.

“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?,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux teases of the book.

“Beautiful World, Where Are You is extraordinary for its compassion, humor, and lyrical delight. It’s extraordinary for the vitality of its characters and for the way it pushes so many contemporary buttons with deadeye accuracy and feeling,” Mitzi Angel, Publisher of FSG says. “Sally Rooney asks questions about things we hold dear: money, love, beauty, truth, success, God, the internet, art, and goodness itself. She shows us how precarious things are and how precious life is. I’m enormously grateful to be working with her again.”

Angel acquired exclusive US rights and non-exclusive open market rights from agents Tracy Bohan and Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency in a two-book deal. Details on a second book have yet to be announced. Rooney was previously published in the United States by Penguin Random House imprint Hogarth.

Beautiful World, Where Are You will be released on Sept. 7, 2021.