Normal People
Sally Rooney, 2018
★ 3.81 from 2m ratings on Goodreads
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. The prose stays plain and close, with a slow, uneasy pull of longing and memory.
Feels like longing and unease. About love and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want an intimate story about class, misreading and love that follows two people over years. The will-they-or-won't-they tension and repeated misreadings may frustrate you if you want clear resolution early.
Why read it
It gives you a plain, closely observed look at how class and misreading shape intimacy, and how ordinary moments between two people can stay with you.
A page from the book
The difference between wanting something and believing you ought to want it.
Everyone is so convinced of his attraction to Miss Neary that sometimes he starts to doubt his own instincts about it. What if, at some level above or below his own perception, he does actually desire her? He doesn’t even really know what desire is supposed to feel like. Any time he has had sex in real life, he has found it so stressful as to be largely unpleasant, leading him to suspect that there’s something wrong with him, that he’s unable to be intimate with women, that he’s somehow developmentally impaired. He lies there afterward and thinks: I hated that so much that I feel sick. Is that just the way he is? Is the nausea he feels when Miss Neary leans over his desk actually his way of experiencing a sexual thrill? How would he know? Sally Rooney.Rooney's second novel was published in 2018 and won the Costa Novel Award; its 2020 TV adaptation made the will-they-or-won't-they tension a lockdown talking point.
Books that feel like this
More by Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney, 2017
Two student spoken-word poets fall in with a photographer and her actor husband, and four Dublin lives begin quietly rearranging each other.
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 Normal People for me?
- You may like it if you want an intimate story about class, misreading and love that follows two people over years. The will-they-or-won't-they tension and repeated misreadings may frustrate you if you want clear resolution early.
- What is Normal People like?
- The prose stays plain and close, with a slow, uneasy pull of longing and memory. Feels like longing and unease. About love and memory.
- What should I read after Normal People?
- If you liked Normal People, try The Midnight Library (Matt Haig), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) and The Secret History (Donna Tartt).
A taste of the feed
The gap between a mother's corrections and a stranger's kindness.
It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction. For instance, when she was a baby her mother had been so worried Nora’s left ear stuck out more than her right that she’d used sticky tape to address the situation, then disguised it beneath a woollen bonnet.
The Midnight Library · Matt Haig
The idea that a life has one crack running down it, decided in advance.
DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
The Secret History · Donna Tartt
The difference between being someone's crush and being seen.
It’s just that I don’t want to be somebody’s crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don’t want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too. I want them to be able to do whatever they want around me. And if they do something I don’t like, I’ll tell them.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower · Stephen Chbosky
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