Marie-Helene Bertino

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 Time

[A] remarkable funny-sad novel... Astonishing

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

I loved this book. It is joyous and expansive and wonderfully funny

I 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 Nighttime

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

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

A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life

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

So surprising and so delightful

[A] profound meditation on what it means to be a person

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

Warm, witty and touching, Beautyland is an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and belonging

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

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

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

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

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

In Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino's Adina (maybe an alien, maybe a troubled human, always both) takes the tired old world and describes it so perfectly that we see it as if for the first time. Sparkling and alive, funny and magnificently true, this book woke me up. It made me weep with appreciation for the hard, strange, small-but-huge lives we lead. It made me fall back in love with this universe

RAMONA AUSUBEL, author of The Last Animal

Beautyland is both an otherworldly and completely human look into one girl's life, written in concise, lyrical prose. It is richly allusive, funny, and hypersmart. Marie-Helene Bertino has knocked it out of the park with this one. I loved it

‘One of the best books I have read this year’ KALIANE BRADLEY, Guardian 
‘A remarkable funny-sad novel’ New York Times 
 
Meet Adina: a woman who has never felt at home on Earth 
 
Born at the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space, Adina is a baby of unusual perception. Tiny and jaundiced, she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognises she is different, not least because of her strange knowledge of a faraway planet. Then a fax machine arrives at home. Her mission is clear: she must report on the oddities of humankind. 
 
As Adina grows up, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and delights of human existence. But then she starts to wonder. Is there a chance there are others like her out there? 
 
Adina sees our world differently. And her gentle, perceptive – and funny – observations offer a quietly joyful new view of life on Earth, the challenge of knowing ourselves and the miracle of finding our people in this vast universe. 
 
‘Beautyland is a miracle. I’ll be rereading it forever’ KAVEH AKBAR 
‘Beautiful and hilarious and transcendent . . . Bertino is an other-worldly talent’ TOMMY ORANGE 
‘A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life’ DAKOTA JOHNSON

Marie-Helene Bertino

Praise for 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 ...

[A] remarkable funny-sad novel... Astonishing

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 stra ...

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 ...

[A] remarkable funny-sad novel... Astonishing

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 stra ...

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 ...

[A] remarkable funny-sad novel... Astonishing

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 stra ...

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter