Normal People

Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the London Review of Books and elsewhere. Conversations with Friends 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. Normal People was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019 and won the Costa Novel of the Year in 2018. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018, as well as the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2019. Sally Rooney co-wrote the television adaptation of Normal People which was broadcast on the BBC in 2020, and for which she was nominated for an Emmy award.'The literary phenomenon of the decade.' - GuardianThe best novel published this year.A future classic.Quite astonishing.The most enjoyable novel of the year.The best young novelist - indeed one of the best novelists - I've read in years.Rooney has given us a spellbinding twenty-first-century love story, and asserted herself as one of the major young writers in the English-speaking world.Effortlessly brilliant . . . tender and devastating.The best book I read last year.Best novel this year by a country mile is Normal People by Sally Rooney . . . Brilliant.Love, sex, class, work, miscommunication and melancholy are all described in prose that is somehow at once lapidary and mysterious; glittering but with the feeling of something moving like weather behind the sentences.Rooney's second novel is one you read in three days flat, a Tube stop-missing, escalator-reading tale . . . Rooney's style is pure poetry, sparse and heartbreaking, and writing this three months after I finished it I find my chest still aches for the pair of them.*** BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU IS OUT NOW***



'The best young novelist - indeed one of the best novelists - I've read in years.' Olivia Laing

'Superb . . . a tremendous read, full of insight and sweetness.' Anne Enright

'One the best novels I have read in years.' Sheila Heti

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation - awkward but electrifying - something life-changing begins.

Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find they can't.

READ THE BOOK OF THE HIT TV SERIES: THE BBC ADAPTATION OF NORMAL PEOPLE IS NOW AVAILABLE ON BBC IPLAYER AND BBC 1