Meet Adina: a woman who has never felt at home on Earth

*** A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR, JUST LANDED IN THE UK ***

'One of the best books I have read this year’ KALIANE BRADLEY, Guardian
'I do not know how my life would be if I hadn't read this book' *Reader review*
'A stunner. Quirky, poignant, magical, heartbreaking - I loved it' *Reader review*

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.

‘A remarkable funny-sad novel’ New York Times
'I loved this idiosyncratic, funny and wise novel' LAILA LALAMI, author of The Dream Hotel
'Joyous and expansive and wonderfully funny' DAISY JOHNSON, author of Fen
‘A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life’ DAKOTA JOHNSON

"[A] remarkable funny-sad novel... Astonishing" - New York Times

"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

"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" - Bustle

"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" - Literary Hub