Beautyland

A Guardian, NYT and TIME best book of the year, Beautyland is the best of cosy crossover literary fiction – a wise and tender novel about a woman who doesn’t feel at home on Earth

‘One of the best books I have read this year’ KALIANE BRADLEY, Guardian
‘A remarkable funny-sad novel’ New York Times

Meet Adina- a woman who has never felt at home on Earth

Born at the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space, Adina is a baby of unusual perception. Tiny and jaundiced, she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognises she is different, not least because of her strange knowledge of a faraway planet. Then a fax machine arrives at home. Her mission is clear- she must report on the oddities of humankind.

As Adina grows up, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and delights of human existence. But then she starts to wonder. Is there a chance there are others like her out there?

Adina sees our world differently. And her gentle, perceptive – and funny – observations offer a quietly joyful new view of life on Earth, the challenge of knowing ourselves and the miracle of finding our people in this vast universe.

‘Beautyland is a miracle. I’ll be rereading it forever’ KAVEH AKBAR
‘Beautiful and hilarious and transcendent . . . Bertino is an other-worldly talent’ TOMMY ORANGE
‘A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life’ DAKOTA JOHNSON

Review: Bertino’s weightless, joyful prose style nevertheless freights huge emotion. As much about acceptance and community as it is about yearning and divergency, it’s a wonderful novel about making a life on Earth. This is one of the best books I have read this year — KALIANE BRADLEY, author of The Ministry of Time
As tender as it is witty and perceptive… Beautyland is a novel that celebrates being different and reminds us that we are all, in our own way, a little bit alien — Susie Mesure * Spectator *
[A] remarkable funny-sad novel… Astonishing * New York Times *
A highly original and sensitively rendered coming-of-age story. In Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino manages the incredibly difficult feat of making the strange feel familiar, and the familiar feel strange. I loved this idiosyncratic, funny, and wise novel — LAILA LALAMI, author of The Dream Hotel
I loved this book. It is joyous and expansive and wonderfully funny — DAISY JOHNSON, author of Fen

Author Biography: Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, Parakeet and Beautyland. Beautyland has been named a best book of 2024 and a must-read by the New York Times, Guardian, TIME, Elle, Esquire, Goodreads, Nylon, Boston Globe, Literary Hub, San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Review of Books. It was a finalist in the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the Mississippi Review Prize. She is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University and lives in Brooklyn.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
Imprint: Vintage UK
Publication date: 27/03/2025