Normal People: The multimillion copy bestseller
Connell and Marianne both grow up in the same quiet corner of the west of Ireland. That's roughly where any obvious common ground stops. At school, Connell moves easily through social life, well-liked and at ease, while Marianne exists on the outside of all that, largely by choice. Then comes a conversation, clumsy and charged in equal measure, and everything quietly shifts. What follows is a story that stretches across years, tracking two people bound to each other in ways neither can fully explain or escape. It's about desire, certainly, but it's also about friendship, power, and the strange, stubborn pull of someone who knows you better than you'd like. Rooney writes with a precision that can feel almost uncomfortable, the kind of prose that makes you feel caught out rather than simply entertained. Readers have called it emotionally relentless, the sort of book that commandeers your afternoon without apology. One reader described it as something to keep and be grateful for; another said the considerable hype is entirely earned. A Sunday Times number one bestseller and a fixture on the Irish Times list of the top 100 Irish books of this century, Normal People has clearly lodged itself somewhere lasting in the reading public's consciousness. Whether you come to it fresh or return to it again, it's the kind of novel that has a habit of staying with you long after the final page.
- Author: Sally Rooney
- Publisher: Faber & Faber
- Genre: Romance
- ISBN: 978-0571334650
- Pages: 288 pages