Beautyland

Author Marie-Helene Bertino
Narrator Andi Arndt
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 27 March 2025
Run Time 8 hours and 56 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Family life fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Science fiction: aliens / UFOs, Science fiction: space opera.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Meet Adina: a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times, a companion to anyone who has ever felt homesick at home

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. When a fax machine arrives at home, her suspicions are confirmed: it allows her to communicate with her extraterrestrial relatives, who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

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

Beautyland is a shyly joyful novel about real life on our planet, the challenge of knowing ourselves and the miracle of finding our people in this vast universe.

‘One of the best books I have read this year’ KALIANE BRADLEY, Guardian
‘A perfect little polished garnet of a novel’ New York Times
‘Beautyland is a miracle. I’ll be rereading it forever’ KAVEH AKBAR

© Marie-Helene Bertino 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

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

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

DAISY JOHNSON, author of Fen

I think this is going to be a massive hitu2026 an outsideru2019s 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

TOMMY ORANGE, author of There, There

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

KAVEH AKBAR, author of Martyr!

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

DAKOTA JOHNSON

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

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