The new novel from the author of Normal People.
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young-but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Praise for Normal People:
‘The literary phenomenon of the decade.’ – Guardian
‘The best novel published this year.’ – The Times
‘Quite astonishing.’ – Independent
‘The most enjoyable novel of the year.’ – Daily Telegraph
‘Rooney has given us a spellbinding twenty-first-century love story, and
asserted herself as one of the major young writers in the English-speaking
world.’ – Times Literary Supplement
Author Biography
Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends and Normal
People. She was the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young
Writer of the Year Award in 2017. In 2018, Conversations with Friends was
shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and
Normal People was the Waterstones Book of the Year, won the Costa Novel Award
and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Rooney won the Encore Award for Normal
People in 2019. She was the editor of the Stinging Fly in 2018 and a Cullman
Center Fellow at the New York Public Library from 2019–20. She was nominated
for an Emmy for her work on the television adaptation of Normal People, which
was broadcast on the BBC in 2020.