Beautyland

(Paperback)

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A Guardian and TIME best book of the year, Beautyland is the best of crossover literary fiction - a wise and tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth Even as a child, Adina Giorno knows that she is different. She is from a faraway planet. Born at the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, Adina is a baby of unusual perception. Tiny and jaundiced, she reaches for warmth and light. She stumbles through her first years on Earth until a fax machine arrives at home, enabling her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. As she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her observations with the world. Is there a chance there are others like her out there Beautyland introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times, a companion to anyone who has ever felt in exile at home. It is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life in our universe.

Reviews

Bertinos weightless, joyful prose style nevertheless freights huge emotion. As much about acceptance and community as it is about yearning and divergency, its 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
[A] remarkable funny-sad novel... Astonishing * New York Times *
This book is endlessly surprising on the sentence level, but also as a story, and also in its tenderness. We might all need the unexpected love and perspective of a child alien at this point in human history. Beautyland is beautiful and hilarious and transcendent. It honestly feels like a message from another planet. Marie-Helene Bertino is an otherworldly talent -- TOMMY ORANGE, author of There, There
Marie-Helene Bertino's delicious, uncanny vision throughout Beautyland makes everything feel brand-new. The chapters are so propulsive one doesn't even fully notice the way she's subtly deconstructing the world. One page swiftly returns ubiquity to wonder, while the next reminds us that cruelty is a choice, that nothing is inevitable but death. It's impossible for a book to feel this fun and this urgent. Beautyland is a miracle. I'll be rereading it forever -- KAVEH AKBAR, author of Martyr!
A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life -- DAKOTA JOHNSON
The heroine of Marie-Helene Bertino's strange, engrossing third novel is at once fully human and entirely otherworldly... Underlying these paradoxes is the poetic observation that there's nothing more human than the experience of gazing out at a planet full of incomprehensible people who look just like you and deciding that you must be from outer space * TIME *
So surprising and so delightful * New York Times Book Review *
[A] profound meditation on what it means to be a person * TIME *
Within moments of cracking open the cover to Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland, I was sold... A landmark work of literary science-fiction... A wonder... as tender and intimate as it is conceptually courageous * Elle *
Warm, witty and touching, Beautyland is an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and belonging * Esquire *
A startling novel... I read Beautyland in forty-eight hours and was so distracted by the ending that I left my passport on the plane * Bustle *
Wry, melancholy, utterly bewitching... Deftly blurring the line between reality and metaphor to create a work of exquisite beauty, joyfully off-kilter humor, and aching sorrow, Beautyland, and Adina's lonesome journey, will fill and then shatter your heart * Literary Hub *
Wise, lyrical, and unwaveringly original... A tender coming-of-age story, an imaginative thought experiment and a moving depiction of the pain and power that come with being an outsider * Shondaland *
A compelling, touching story that weds Bertino's masterful eye for the poignant detail of the everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the tallest kinds of tales -- so tall, in this case, they are interplanetary. A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty * Kirkus (starred review) *
The triumphant latest from Bertino offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from another planet... Bertino nimbly portrays her protagonist's alienhood as both metaphor and reality. The results are divine * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *

Author Bio

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Beautyland, Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City's Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. Her work has been anthologised in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30. She is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.