Bestselling novelist Sally Rooney swiftly moved from literary darling to the mainstream. What made her such a star? Can she keep it up?
The bestselling novelist swiftly moved from literary darling to the mainstream. What made her such a star? With her new novel, ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You,’ can she keep it up?
It’s hard to pin down the mysterious chemistry between a book and the culture, what causes one novel to catch on instead of another. What is it about Rooney’s world of tormented Dublin intellectuals that has beguiled the reading public so intensely?Sept. 7, 2021 8:31 am ET In 2016, when Mitzi Angel, then publisher at Faber in London, first came across the manuscript of Sally Rooney’s debut novel,she was not envisioning bestseller lists and television adaptations. She was not imagining that Rooney’s future books would be compared to luxury handbags in. She did notice the young people around the office starting to talk about the characters as if they were real people.
“Sally Rooney was an interesting case, as a bookseller, because she is one of the few writers I truly saw scale the ladder by word of mouth,” says Madeline Gressel, marketing director at McNally Jackson, the independent bookstore chain in New York, via email. She recalls Rooney’s debut novel moving from a single copy in the store, to facing out on the shelves, to a place on the store’s bestseller wall.
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