Shelfology Book Pairing

A Novel

by Sally Rooney

#1 INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK ONE OF TIME'S MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2021 NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY BUZZFEED, ESQUIRE, THE GUARDIAN, KIRKUS REVIEWS AND FINANCIAL TIMES “Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s best novel yet. Funny and smart, full of sex and love and people doing their best to connect.” —The New York Times Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they worry about sex and friendship and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

by Yann Martel

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Esquire • Marie Claire • Art+ • The Times • The Guardian • The Observer • The Financial Times • BBC • The Sydney Morning Herald • A Globe and Mail Spring 2026 Read • Featured in The American Booksellers Association's Spring 2026 Preview • Oprah Daily • People’s Best Books of March 2026 From the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from two commoners: an ancient soldier and modern scholar. “The past is never done with: always the song continues” Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs. In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea, but known to all as son of nobody. As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love, and grief. In this masterpiece of myth, history, and domesticity, Son of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live—then, now, and always.