Normal People

Publisher's Summary

Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Winner of Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards.

Winner of the Costa Novel Award.

Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

"[Rooney] has been hailed as the first great millennial novelist for her stories of love and late capitalism...[she writes] some of the best dialogue I've read." (The New Yorker)

From celebrated author Sally Rooney, "the literary phenomenon of the decade" (The Guardian): a universal story of love, friendship, and growing up.

At school, Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal. 

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

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.

©2019 Sally Rooney (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

“I’m transfixed by the way Rooney works, and I’m hardly the only one...like any confident couturier, she’s slicing the free flow of words into the perfect shape.... She writes about tricky commonplace things (text messages, sex) with a familiarity no one else has.” (The Paris Review)

"This superb book more than lives up to the high expectations set for it by Rooney's lauded first novel.... Showcasing Rooney's focus and ability in building character relationships that are as subtle and infinite as real-life ones, and her perceptive portrayal of class, Normal People gets at the hard work of becoming a person and the near impossibility of knowing if a first love is a true one." (Booklist) 

"I went into a tunnel with this book and didn’t want to come out. Absolutely engrossing and surprisingly heart-breaking with more depth, subtlety, and insight than any one novel deserves. Young love is a subject of much scorn, but Rooney understands the cataclysmic effects our youth has on the people we become. She has restored not only love’s dignity, but also its significance." (Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter) 

Beautiful, compelling

The story is so compelling and engrossing, the writing is beautiful, and the narrator is excellent. It’s overall just a dream of a novel. I felt I lived in the world of this book during the hours I listened, and it’s so worthwhile.