Faber unveils Rooney cover designs

Faber has unveiled two cover designs for Sally Rooney's forthcoming novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, especially for indie bookshops, Waterstones and Easons.

The jacket has been designed by Jon Gray under the art direction of Donna Payne, creative director at Faber, with illustrations from Manshen Lo, represented by the Heart Agency.

The exclusive edition for indie bookshops features a yellow colourway. Meanwhile, the Waterstones edition is in blue and will also include an exclusive short story from Sally Rooney and have yellow sprayed edges. A trade paperback exclusive to Easons will also feature yellow sprayed edges. Special endpapers will be incorporated across all editions (see below).

Rooney's third novel will be published on 7th September. Described as "a book of friendship and sex, art and faith, power and love", it tells the story of Alice and Eileen, two best friends nearing their thirties in different places and on very different trajectories.

The synopsis explains: "Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution 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 get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships 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?"

Rooney was the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. In 2018, Conversations with Friends was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, while Normal People was named Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, Waterstones Book of the Year, the winner of the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Rooney then won the Encore Award for Normal People in 2019, and was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the television adaptation, which broadcast on the BBC in 2020 to huge acclaim.

Faber will also publish in e-book and audio format.