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Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You - Exclusive Global Launch

Tuesday Sep 07 2021 1:30 pm, Virtual, Online
NOTE: This event has already taken place. Please visit this page to see our upcoming events.

In a global exclusive, award-winning novelist Sally Rooney (author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends) will be joined in conversation by Emma Dabiri to discuss her much anticipated third novel Beautiful World, Where are You (Knopf Canada). The exclusive event is presented by the Southbank Centre and will be available to a global audience as a live stream, in association with McNally Robinson Booksellers here in Canada.

Pre-ordering a copy of Rooney's new book entitles you to 10% off the ticket price of this exclusive event. You will receive a redeemable code once the order has been placed.

For more detailed information on the event, please visit the North American event page. It will go live at 12:30 pm SK / 1:30 pm MB.

Sally Rooney was the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. In 2018, Conversations with Friends was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, while Normal People was named Waterstones Book of the Year, won the Costa Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Rooney won the Encore Award for Normal People in 2019. She was the editor of literary magazine The Stinging Fly in 2018 and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library from 2019 – 2020.

Host Emma Dabiri is an Irish-Nigerian academic, activist and broadcaster. Her 2019 debut Don’t Touch My Hair was published to critical and commercial acclaim. Her latest book What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, published in April 2021, is a Sunday Times and Irish Times bestseller. A regular broadcaster on the BBC, Dabiri recently hosted BBC Radio 4’s critically-acclaimed documentary Journeys into Afro-futurism, as well as presenting and co-producing Hair Power: Me and My Afro on Channel 4.

See:

Normal People

- Sally Rooney

Trade paperback $21.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.90

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
A PENGUIN BOOK CLUB PICK

A wondrously wise, genuinely unputdownable novel from Sally Rooney, winner of the 2017 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award (at 26, tied with Zadie Smith for the youngest-ever recipient)--the quintessential coming-of-age love story for our time.

Connell Waldron is one of the most popular boys in his small-town high school--he is a star of the football team, an excellent student, and never wanting for attention from girls. The one thing he doesn't have is money. Marianne Sheridan, a classmate of Connell's, has the opposite problem. Marianne is plain-looking, odd, and stubborn, and while her family is well-off, she has no friends to speak of. There is, however, a deep and undeniable connection between the two teenagers, one that develops into a secret relationship.
     Everything changes when both Connell and Marianne are accepted to Trinity College. Suddenly Marianne is well-liked and elegant, holding court with her intellectual friends while Connell hangs at the sidelines, not quite as fluent in language of the elite. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle each other, falling in and out of romance but never straying far from where they started. And as Marianne experiments with an increasingly dangerous string of boyfriends, Connell must decide how far he is willing to go to save his oldest friend.
     Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a novel that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the inescapable challenges of family and friendships. Normal People is a book that you will read in one sitting, and then immediately share with your friends.

Conversations with Friends

- Sally Rooney

Trade paperback $23.00
Reader Reward Price: $20.70

NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES o From the New York Times bestselling author of Normal People . . . "[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship."--Entertainment Weekly
 
SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE TIME 100 NEXT LIST o WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD o ONE OF BUZZFEED'S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE o ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vogue, Slate o ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Elle


Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick's flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange--and then painful--intimacy.

Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

"Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they're figuring out how to be adults."--Celeste Ng, Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast

"The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they're suspenseful."--Curtis Sittenfeld, The Week

"Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions."--New York

"A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney's consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney's natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do."--Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

"This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I'm not alone."--Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)

Don't Touch My Hair

- Emma Dabiri

Trade paperback $21.99
Reader Reward Price: $19.79

'Groundbreaking . . . a scintillating, intellectual investigation into black women and the very serious business of our hair, as it pertains to race, gender, social codes, tradition, culture, cosmology, maths, politics, philosophy and history' Bernardine Evaristo, The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

In this powerful book about why black hair matters, Emma Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power and on to today's Natural Hair Movement, the Cultural Appropriation Wars and beyond. We look at everything from hair capitalists like Madam C.J. Walker in the early 1900s to the rise of Shea Moisture today, from women's solidarity and friendship to 'black people time', forgotten African scholars and the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's braids.

The scope of black hairstyling ranges from pop culture to cosmology, from prehistoric times to the (afro)futuristic. Uncovering sophisticated indigenous mathematical systems in black hairstyles, alongside styles that served as secret intelligence networks leading enslaved Africans to freedom, Don't Touch My Hair proves that far from being only hair, black hairstyling culture can be understood as an allegory for black oppression and, ultimately, liberation.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 IRISH BOOK AWARDS

What White People Can Do Next

- Emma Dabiri

Trade paperback $16.99
Reader Reward Price: $15.29

THE SUNDAY TIMES AND IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER

'An absolute blockbuster of clear thinking and new angles...the most clear, alliance building, shame removing look at race. Emma is once-in-a generation clever' Caitlin Moran


We need to talk about racial injustice in a different way: one that builds on the revolutionary ideas of the past and forges new connections.

In this incisive, radical and practical essay, Emma Dabiri - acclaimed author of Don't Touch My Hair - draws on years of research and personal experience to challenge us to create meaningful, lasting change.

'Impactful . . . Emma expertly outlines how the idea of race was constructed to bolster capitalism and explains how, in a divided world, unity and coalition are needed to create a future that works for everyone' Cosmopolitan