FICTION
46k
Sally Rooney’s third novel sold 46,065 copies in the UK in the first week of its publication
The most anticipated, discussed and accessorised novel of the year was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. It’s a book about the accommodations of adulthood, which plays with interiority and narrative distance as Rooney’s characters consider the purpose of friendship, sex and politics – plus the difficulties of fame and novelwriting – in a world on fire.
Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s magnum opus reached Englishlanguage readers, in a mighty feat of translation by Jennifer Croft:; Kazuo Ishiguro, whose probes the limits of emotion in the story of a sickly girl and her “artificial friend”; and acclaimed US author Gayl Jones, whose epic of liberated slaves in 17th-century Brazil, , has been decades in the making.
