RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... the voice is precise, luxuriant and absurd ... Bennett cuts through melancholy with hilarity frequently ... Bennett is capable of breathtakingly beautiful description...and of eccentricity ... Pond was a brief, unique and chic work by a gifted prose stylist; Checkout 19, which delves deeper and more courageously into similar themes (books, sex, isolation and female independence) confirms Bennett’s ingenuity. Thrilling, rich and strange.
Sally Rooney
RaveIrish Independent (IRE)First of all: yes, this book is excellent. Not merely as good as the first two Sally Rooney novels but subtly, fretfully better in its intelligent, sympathetic dissection of life. You’ll love it ... Rooney restricts herself to describing surfaces, which results in a filmic realism and a regard for the privacy or unknowability of the characters themselves ... A sequence distilling Eileen and Simon’s backstory...is a joy to read, as is an entrancing account of a wedding, in which the promiscuous third-person narrator shows us decades of depth and pain and affection at breathless speed ... Rooney’s fiction continues to present a world in which the good end happily and this gave rise to some objection in this reviewer—as well as satisfaction. However, the slow unpacking and deepening of familiar themes—relationships, families, precarity and love in Beautiful World, Where Are You is intense, focused and entertaining: her concern is nothing less than the question of how, in the current moment, we should live.
