New from the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends
In the new novel by Sally Rooney, the world-famous bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends, we meet a quartet of characters who are still young, but the reality of life is catching up with them. After a mental breakdown, Alice, a writer, moves to the country and meets Felix, an ordinary boy who works in a warehouse. Her friend Eileen is staying in Dublin after school, going through a post-break-up crisis and her thoughts keep returning to Simon, her childhood sweetheart. Like Sally Rooney's previous works, her prose novel offers a revealing, almost intimate insight into the lives of young people. At the same time, the voice that is increasingly aware of the current problems of the world - its contradictions, injustice, and especially its unsustainability - is also becoming stronger. Do the heroes thus stand, in Alice's words, "on the edge of darkness, in the last lighted room, as witnesses to a trauma"? And will they find a way to believe that a beautiful world really exists?
