Normal People

Review:It is time to take a sharp inhale, people. Sally Rooney has produced a second novel, Normal People. It is superb . . . a tremendous read, full of insight and sweetness. (Anne Enright Guardian); Magnificent . . . Rooney is the best young novelist - indeed one of the best novelists - I've read in years. (Olivia Laing New Statesman); Astonishingly fresh. . . Rooney is such a gifted, brave and adventurous writer, so exceptionally good at observing the lies people tell themselves on the deepest level, in noting how much we forgive, and above all in portraying love . . . [Normal People] is a future classic. (Kate Clanchy Observer); One the best novels I have read in years. Sally Rooney understands the complexities of love, its radical intimacy, and how power is always shifting between people, and she tells her story in a way that feels new and old at the same time. It is intelligent, spare and mesmerising, and it sent me back to an earlier point in my life in such a vivid and real way, reanimating for me with that period of time (first love), which I had thought was lost to me forever, but which felt born again in the form of this book. (Sheila Heti, author of MOTHERHOOD and HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE); I couldn't put Normal People down - I didn't think I could love it as much as Conversations with Friends, but I did. Sally Rooney is a treasure. I can't wait to see what she does next. (Elif Batuman, author of THE POSSESSED and THE IDIOT); It's all I want to talk about . . . How brilliant to feel so excited about a new novel . . . I'm pleased but unsurprised to report that Normal People is even better. It should obviously win [the Booker Prize]. The best novel published this year. (Times); Rooney writes so well of the condition of being a young, gifted but self-destructive woman, both the mentality and physicality of it. She is alert to the invisible bars imprisoning the apparently free. Her hyperarticulate characters may fail to communicate their fragile selves, but Rooney does it for them in a voice distinctively her own. (Guardian); Rooney shares with [Sylvia] Plath a knack for particularising a feminine consciousness, and this novel is the best I've read on what it means to be young and female right now. (Daily Mail); Fascinating, ferocious and shrewd. Sally Rooney has the sharpest eye for all of the most delicate cruelties of human interaction. (Lisa McInerney); Normal People shines . . . it is totally exhilarating in its naturalness, as easy as thinking and as real as experiencing. It's easy to tumble through its first 30 pages without feeling like you have so much as blinked, so instantly comfortable and totally intoxicating is Rooney's prose, and her rendering of an enduring love. It is an undeniably important novel about how we feel and how we relate, to each other and to ourselves. Read it and feel grateful and changed afterwards - as though you have learned something worthwhile about yourself. (VICE).Book Description: The highly anticipated second novel from the most talked-about novelist in years.Sally Rooney set the books world buzzing with her debut Conversations With Friends; Normal People is a girl-meets-boy story with a difference, interrogating the difficulties of sincere communication in a complicated, post-ironic world. It's even more unusual and assured than her first book.About the Author: Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, The White Review, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Kevin Barry's Stonecutter and The Winter Page anthology. Her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, was a Sunday Times, Observer and Telegraph Book of the Year; it was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Rooney was also shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for 'Mr Salary' and was the winner of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second novel Normal People was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018. She is the editor of the biannual Dublin literary magazine The Stinging Fly.