Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney review – author of her own discontent

Despite the dazzling dialogue and familiar delights, Rooney's story of a young prize-winning writer is her most demanding book to date

Even in these accelerated times it seems bewildering: was it really only four years ago that Sally Rooney made her debut? The ecstatic welcome given to Conversations With Friends, a deadpan comedy of arty Dublin millennials, was a mere curtain-raiser to the escape velocity achieved a year later by her cross-class teen love story, Normal People. Amid the strenuously cerebral to-and-fro of the online Sallyology industry, arguing over how far the books reflected or betrayed the author's avowed Marxism, it could be forgotten (though never, perversely, by her detractors) how purely and straightforwardly enjoyable Rooney is to read, which isn't to say, as Will Self has, that Normal People represents very simple stuff with no literary ambition".

Rooney's publisher recently announced the opening of a pop-up shop to sell copies of her latest novel. She's still just 30 and while I can't begin to imagine the oddity of her existence over the past few years, Beautiful World, Where Are You gives us a fair idea. Her third book, it's her first to be written in the glare of expectation and, boy, can you tell. There are familiar delights here, for sure, but unalloyed pleasure isn't on the agenda; a sort of Being Sally Rooney, it threatens - I suspect - to befuddle fans and leave naysayers cold, even if the point of all its agonised introspection seems to be that the darkest judgments issuing from the bowels of the internet have nothing on Rooney's own guilty self-scrutiny.

Their relationship crackles with the flinty repartee that is the shining currency of all Rooney's fiction