discuss their first foray into the genre.
Seth Maxon: What was your previous romance-novel exposure going into
The Duke and I?
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Madeline Ducharme: I’ve always
hated those cheesy covers of thick, cheap, paperback romance novels. Maybe it was my latent queerness, but something about the bulging muscles and sighing women in that corny art style just immediately turned me off. Stuff like this.
Maxon: I am little bit older than you, and also a straight man, and these sorts of covers did always make me laugh more than anything. I think a youth spent with Fabio as a ubiquitous romance-novel cover model and cultural joke as a dumb hunk who women nonetheless fantasized about forged my general impression of romance novels as fundamentally silly, if hot to some.
They also shared a brief description to go with the announcement. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a 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.
The 29-year-old Irish author s follow-up to Normal People and Conversations With Friends, called Beautiful World, Where Are You, is set to be released on September 7.
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Bowler said: “It absorbs you once again in the inner lives of characters with brilliant minds and aching hearts, while marking the next creative leap from a singular writer. The book scintillates with intelligence, empathy and, yes, beauty.”
The novel will be published by Faber and will feature the story of Alice and Eileen, “two best friends nearing their thirties in different places and on very different trajectories”.
“As the summer approaches, they exchange emails about art, friendship, the world around them and the complicated love affairs unfolding in their own lives. They say they want to see each other again soon. But what will happen when they do?”