Normal People: A Novel

Synopsis

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.