Three years after the publication of the hugely successful Normal People, Irish author Sally Rooney has announced publication details of her next novel. What is likely to be one of 2021’s most anticipated novels, Beautiful World, Where Are You will be published by Faber & Faber on September 7 2021.

Described as “a book of friendship and sex, art and faith, power and love”, Beautiful World, Where Are You tells the story of best friends Alice and Eileen, both in their 20s but on very different paths. Somewhat similar to Conversations With Friends, a lot of Alice and Eileen’s correspondence takes place over email. According to Faber & Faber the pair “exchange emails about art, friendship, the world around them and the complicated love affairs unfolding in their own lives. They say they want to see each other again soon. But what will happen when they do?”

In the novel’s description, the publisher explains that Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young – but life is catching up with them. 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?

After the groundbreaking television adaptation of Normal People was released last year, captivating an entire nation of locked-down viewers, fans of the show will be pleased to here that a TV adaptation of Rooney’s first novel, Conversations With Friends, is currently underway. Led by the same director, Lenny Abrahamson, the show is due to be released this year but may be delayed due to Covid-19 restrictions on filming.

According to The Irish Times, Normal People was the seventh highest-selling book in Ireland last year, with more than 40,000 sales, and Conversations with Friends 19th, with 22,135. Normal People was the 16th highest-selling book in Britain last year and Conversations 114th. Beautiful World, Where Are You promises big things.