Normal People

Normal People was published in 2018 and is Sally Rooney's second novel, following Conversations with Friends. It was first published by Faber & Faber, and it became a bestseller in the United States and in China, where its story of two young people finding their footing with each other found a large readership. The novel is set in Ireland between 2011 and 2015, in the years of the post-crash downturn, and it moves between a town in County Sligo and Dublin.

The book is written in short chapters with much of the punctuation and most of the quotation marks taken out of the dialogue, so the pages read as a continuous present and the reader works out who is speaking from the rhythm of the sentences. That technique is a large part of why the novel is quoted so often: it keeps the reader inside the gap between what the two say to each other and what they mean, which is what the book is made of.

Neither of them is a type. Connell is clever, well-liked and anxious about money and class; Marianne is wealthy, proud and badly treated at home. The novel follows them through a scholarship, a period living abroad, a relationship that goes wrong for reasons neither of them will name, and a friendship that survives it. It was adapted for television in 2020.