Beautyland

byMarie-Helene Bertino, Andi Arndt (Read by)
Even as a child, Adina Giorno knows that she is different. She is from a faraway planet.

Born at the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, Adina is a baby of unusual perception. Tiny and jaundiced, she reaches for warmth and light. She stumbles through her first years on Earth until a fax machine arrives at home, enabling her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

As she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her observations with the world. Is there a chance there are others like her out there?

Beautyland introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times, a companion to anyone who has ever felt in exile at home. It is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life in our universe.

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 Hotel

About Marie-Helene Bertino

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.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529966688
  • Length: 536 minutes
  • Price: £14.00
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