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Beautiful World, Where Are You

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Title of the novel, Beautiful World Where Are You.Title: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Format: Novel
Audience: Late Teens and Adults

Sally Rooney’s third novel is as much a Sally Rooney novel as she intends it to be – one where the author does not shy away from being who she is, nor does she pretend to be someone she is not. Beautiful World, Where Are You is a dialectical relationship to her prior works, and in following two critically acclaimed publications, Rooney has solved the burden of success insofar as by writing about the burden of success.

Readers who enjoyed Conversations with Friends and Normal People will certainly find fulfillment in Rooney’s newest work. Part epistolary, part an exploration of ideas, and part a telling of young love, this novel is a jostle of fascinating concepts that attempt to tackle both issues on a grander scale, and ones that hit too close to home. Set around four individuals who, while still young, feel life catching up to them, and whose relationships with one another are tangled together, all approach life in different ways, and it is their understanding of what they know they want compared to what they are unsure or, more possibly, unaware of, that spurs on the decisions they make, and the ramifications that follow.

From the dialogue that does not falter, to the prose that flows seamlessly from page to page, to the discussions of the environment we live in and the future we are to construct, Rooney has created a wonderful work that truly does ask the reader the question, where is this beautiful world?

 

Find Beautiful World, Where Are You in print via the catalog.

Find Beautiful World, Where Are You online via an eAudiobook and an eBook.

 

Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder And Memory In Northern Ireland

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Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder And Memory In Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Who it’s for: Adults
Format: eBook, digital audiobook

Say Nothing begins with the abduction of widow and mother of 10, Jean McConville, in Belfast in 1972. From there, Radden Keefe traces several of the key players of the Troubles, the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland between nationalists (often Catholic) who wanted to see Northern Ireland united with Ireland, and loyalists (often Protestant) who supported continued British rule in Northern Ireland.

McConville was one of the “disappeared,” sixteen people who were determined to have been taken, killed, and buried in unmarked graves by the Provisional IRA (the IRA admitted to being involved in nine of the sixteen cases). But Radden Keefe’s account is not just of McConville and her children. We also meet Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and, most intriguing, the Price sisters, Delours and Marian, all members of the IRA (though Adams has denied his own membership in the organization). Radden Keefe describes hunger strikes, bombings, prison stays, and the gradual shift by some members of the IRA from violence to politics. This shift is an underlying theme of the story; some IRA members viewed the shift and the compromises made as removing the moral justification for the violent acts they had committed. This led to some of them speaking at length with interviewers for a Boston College oral history project. That project’s history, and its legal battles and their outcomes are entwined in the story of the more recent events in Radden Keefe’s account. 

Throughout the book, Radden Keefe returns to Jean McConville, and to her children and their lives after their mother’s abduction. Many of the others discussed in the book were leaders of or soldiers in the IRA, so McConville’s children provide a different view of the Troubles and the events discussed in the book.

Say Nothing often reads like fiction, but it’s not. Every so often, the realization hits that these people are real, many of them still living and dealing with the trauma of their experiences. Radden Keefe has thoroughly researched this story, taking four years to conduct research and interviews, leading to a fascinating true account of events that occurred not that long ago.

You can find Say Nothing in eBook and digital audiobook format on OverDrive/Libby, or in digital audiobook format on RBdigital.