“You probably wrote it yourself,” Felix says. “She’s got a Wikipedia page,” someone coos at a party, searching Alice’s name. Their relationship crackles with the flinty repartee that is the shining currency of all Rooney’s fiction. Eileen, employed by a Dublin literary magazine, beds her girlhood crush, Simon, a political adviser Alice, now living by the sea in Mayo, falls for her Tinder hookup, Felix, a warehouse worker. Such thoughts, presented unsatirically, provide an uneasy context for the novel’s main action, a love-quadrangle storyline à la Conversations With Friends. Burnt out after an ill-fated spell in New York, Alice feels she “only had two good ideas” (actual lol, as one of the characters might say) and won’t write another book, not just because she detests hype-cycle whims and media intrusion, but because writing fiction feels “vulgar, decadent and even epistemically violent” at a time when we ought to be redistributing global resources “and transitioning… to a sustainable economic model”. The book centres on the sexual entanglements of a prize-winning writer, Alice, and her old university pal, Eileen, both turning 30. Their relationship crackles with the flinty repartee that is the shining currency of all Rooney’s fiction There are familiar delights here, for sure, but unalloyed pleasure isn’t on the agenda a sort of Being Sally Rooney, it threatens – I suspect – to befuddle fans and leave naysayers cold, even if the point of all its agonised introspection seems to be that the darkest judgments issuing from the bowels of the internet have nothing on Rooney’s own guilty self-scrutiny. Her third book, it’s her first to be written in the glare of expectation and, boy, can you tell.

She’s still just 30 and while I can’t begin to imagine the oddity of her existence over the past few years, Beautiful World, Where Are You gives us a fair idea. Rooney’s publisher recently announced the opening of a pop-up shop to sell copies of her latest novel. Amid the strenuously cerebral to-and-fro of the online Sallyology industry, arguing over how far the books reflected or betrayed the author’s avowed Marxism, it could be forgotten (though never, perversely, by her detractors) how purely and straightforwardly enjoyable Rooney is to read, which isn’t to say, as Will Self has, that Normal People represents “very simple stuff with no literary ambition”. E ven in these accelerated times it seems bewildering: was it really only four years ago that Sally Rooney made her debut? The ecstatic welcome given to Conversations With Friends, a deadpan comedy of arty Dublin millennials, was a mere curtain-raiser to the escape velocity achieved a year later by her cross-class teen love story, Normal People.

Beautiful world where are u