Normal People

Sally Rooney’s love story about how one person can change another’s life – a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully.

In school, Connell and Marianne affect not to know each other. People know that Marianne lives in the white mansion with the driveway and that Connell’s mother is a cleaner, but no one knows of the special relationship between these facts. Despite these social tangles, a connection grows between them and when they both get places to study at Trinity College in Dublin it lasts long into the following years. Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.

“…while Rooney may write about apparent aimlessness and all the distractions of our age, her novels are laser-focused and word-perfect. They build power by a steady accretion of often simple declarative sentences that track minuscule shifts in feelings … Although frequently heartbreaking, Normal People isn’t bleak. The brave determination of Rooney’s characters to reach out and try to catch each other with no guarantee of success — and to open themselves to ‘moments of joy despite everything’ — is ultimately hopeful.”  –  Heller McAlpin, NPR

Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology. Her second novel, which grew out of characters in her 2016 short story At the Clinic, led to a slew of award nominations and the sobriquet ‘the voice of her generation’. Rooney was just 27 when Normal People sent the reputation she had won for her first book, Conversations with Friends, stratospheric.