Beautyland

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 TimeAs 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 HotelI loved this book. It is joyous and expansive and wonderfully funny – DAISY JOHNSON, author of FenI think this is going to be a massive hit… an outsider’s perspective that is relentlessly inventive and always perfectly judged. It starts of quirky and deepens and deepens. I wanted to underline / steal a phrase or an insight on every other page – MARK HADDON, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NighttimeThis 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, ThereMarie-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 JOHNSONAs 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 * Spectator *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 *

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.