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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Apr 2019, 272 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2020, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Valerie Morales
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A wondrous and wise coming-of-age love story from the celebrated author of Conversations with Friends
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.
January 2011
Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She's still wearing her school uniform, but she's taken off the sweater, so it's just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.
Oh, hey, he says.
Come on in.
She turns and walks down the hall. He follows her, closing the door behind him. Down a few steps in the kitchen, his mother Lorraine is peeling off a pair of rubber gloves. Marianne hops onto the countertop and picks up an open jar of chocolate spread, in which she has left a teaspoon.
Marianne was telling me you got your mock results today, Lorraine says.
We got English back, he says. They come back separately. Do you want to head on?
Lorraine folds the rubber gloves up neatly and replaces them below the sink. Then she starts unclipping her hair. To Connell this seems like something she could accomplish in the car.
And I hear you did very well, she says.
He was top of the class, says Marianne.
Right, Connell says. Marianne did pretty good too. Can we go...
Costa Book Awards
2018
Sally Rooney is 27 years old. Her thirst for dialogue and her canny wit has a breezy engagement. She curates the cynical beauty of millennials better than any fiction writer I have read, and it is her greatest instrument as a writer, this tragicomedy oeuvre, that forces you to stay reading after you told yourself you would stop and go to bed...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and The Possessed
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. Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers and The Vacationers
Sally Rooney's Normal People is the deeply felt story of a foundational relationship at the margin of friendship and true love, of shame and devotion. This inventive and profound novel proves what great fiction can do - it can open a world at the seams. J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Saints for All Occasions
Sally Rooney is a master of the literary page-turner. In Normal People, she has once again crafted a complicated love story that's impossible to put down. It's also full of wise observations about class, gender roles and how the past shapes the present. Rooney's novels are populated with characters and situations that feel at once totally familiar and like something we've never seen in fiction before. Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?
This is 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 mesmerizing, 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. Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
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.
Two decades before I was born, a cousin of mine entered seminary and killed himself within the week. No one in the family discussed it. He was dead. No need to talk about why. But death by suicide has undergone a radical cultural shift. It is no longer absurdly kept secret.
In Sally Rooney's Normal People, Connell fantasizes about killing himself. Despite being a fictional character, many young adults feel exactly as he does, unanchored and more alone than ever. Many enter into soulless relationships, or as they call them, situationships. They are on the same sports team or work in the same office and they hook up. Or they engage in Tinder, Grindr and other apps, which may satiate desire in the short term, but the loose connections leave...
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If you liked Normal People, try these:
Beautiful World, Where Are You
by Sally Rooney
Published 2022
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.
by Meg Mason
Published 2022
A compulsively readable debut novel - spiky, sharp, intriguingly dark, and tender - about a woman on the edge that combines the psychological insight of Sally Rooney with the sharp humor of Nina Stibbe and the emotional resonance of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
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