Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney, 2017
Romance Contemporary fictionLiterary fiction
Two student spoken-word poets fall in with a photographer and her actor husband, and four Dublin lives begin quietly rearranging each other. Cool, talky and quick to read, with a sharp-eared voice that catches the small shifts between four friends.
Feels like longing, tenderness and humor. About love, identity and friendship.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy close-up novels of friendship and attraction, where most of the drama happens in conversation. The narration stays tight inside one woman's self-scrutiny, so the other three can feel held at a distance.
Why read it
It's a quick, sharp read about wanting to be seen and not quite knowing how to ask, and Rooney's ear for how people talk to each other is the draw.
A page from the book
The person whose description of you becomes the way you see yourself.
After school we used to lie in her room listening to music and talking about why we liked each other. These were long and intense conversations, and felt so momentous to me that I secretly transcribed parts of them from memory in the evenings. When Bobbi talked about me it felt like seeing myself in a mirror for the first time. I also looked in actual mirrors more often. I started taking a close interest in my face and body, which I’d never done before. I asked Bobbi questions like: do I have long legs? Or short? Sally Rooney.Before fiction, Rooney was a champion debater at Trinity College Dublin, named top speaker at the 2013 European Universities Debating Championships.
Books that feel like this
More by Sally Rooney
Normal People
Sally Rooney, 2018
Two teenagers who ignore each other in public begin a secret intimacy that follows them through school and university, where class and misreading keep reshaping love.
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney, 2024
Two brothers, one bereaved summer, and the careful negotiations of love — Rooney's close, unsparing attention to how people actually talk to each other.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Conversations with Friends for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy close-up novels of friendship and attraction, where most of the drama happens in conversation. The narration stays tight inside one woman's self-scrutiny, so the other three can feel held at a distance.
- What is Conversations with Friends like?
- Cool, talky and quick to read, with a sharp-eared voice that catches the small shifts between four friends. Feels like longing, tenderness and humor. About love, identity and friendship.
- What should I read after Conversations with Friends?
- If you liked Conversations with Friends, try Great Big Beautiful Life (Emily Henry), Flawless (Elsie Silver) and It Happened One Summer (Tessa Bailey).
A taste of the feed
The compliment that sounds like an insult until it isn’t.
I think you live in a world that’s more interesting than the one most people live in,” he says, and just as my heart starts to sink with disappointment, with a kind of loneliness, he adds, “and I wish I could live in it too.” I feel myself beaming. “I’ll take you sometime.” “I’d like that,” he says.
Great Big Beautiful Life · Emily Henry
How quickly a joke about taking a bullet stops being a joke.
Please don’t cry. I fucking hate it when you cry. It’s like a bullet to my chest.” “Taken many bullets, have you?” My voice is weak, and I hate that. “No,” he husks, “but I would. For you, I would.
Flawless · Elsie Silver
What if a broken heart were something a coroner could actually find?
Can you die from a broken heart, do you know? And if I did and they cut me wide open, would I bleed loving him? When they lift my heart out of my chest cavity to weigh it, does it weigh the same as his top lip? Is his name carved into my third rib to the left? Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. He’s killing me. Loving him is killing me too, and I’m afraid because how many loves really, do you get in a lifetime? How many chances do you give it before you let it go?
Magnolia Parks · Jessa Hastings
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