Since her first novel, Conversations With Friends, was published in 2017, author Sally Rooney has skyrocketed to international fame. Born in County Mayo, Ireland, in 1991, Rooney studied English Literature at Trinity College in Dublin, an experience that has informs much of her work.
Rooney is known for her insightful, character-driven novels that follow multiple characters as they navigate the complexities of adult friendships, relationships, and ambitions. Her books are often set in the intellectual milieu of Dublin, with protagonists whose situations are simultaneously characterized by belonging to and feeling alienated from their elite environment.
Rooney is deeply interested in the question of how we as people relate to each other within the material confines of our world, and her love interests often experience powerful intimate moments alone that become tarnished or fraught in their respective social existences. These subjects, coupled with her sharp, empathetic yet detached observational style, have earned Rooney the oft-repeated honor of being “the first great millennial author.”
With her most recent novel, Intermezzo, published on September 24, now would be a great time to dive into Rooney's remarkable repertoire if you haven't already.
2017
Conversations with Friends
Rooney's first novel introduces us to college students and former lovers Frances Flynn and Bobbi Connolly as they work to establish themselves as members of Dublin’s literary class. Their golden opportunity comes when when journalist Melissa Baines is struck by their poetry performance one night and decides to profile the young women in her magazine. Melissa and her husband, Nick, are both ten years their senior, and while Melissa grows apparently infatuated with the dazzling and infinitely poised Bobbi, wry, impassive Francis is drawn to Melissa’s attractive yet vapid actor husband, Nick.
It’s all fun and games at first, but as the lives of these four interlocutors become more deeply intertwined in different ways, the increasingly blurred lines between love, resentment, infatuation, and jealousy muddle their once-clear understandings of themselves and their place in the world around them, with both painful and emotionally powerful consequences.
2019
Normal People
When Normal People came out in 2019, the sincere yet complicated lovers Marianne and Connell captured the damaged hearts of readers around the world. The New York Times bestseller was longlisted for the Booker Prize and has been adapted into an Emmy-nominated Hulu original series.
Marianne and Connell have had vastly different experiences growing up in the same small town. Connell is popular and the star of his high school soccer team. Marianne is deeply lonely, neglected by her mother, tormented by her older brother, and harassed by the kids at school—kids that Connell calls friends. Although they are worlds apart, the two share a strange connection within the confines of Marianne’s stately home, which Connell frequently visits after school while his mother is employed as a cleaner there. Outside those walls, Connell knows, their secret intimacy cannot survive—or maybe he’s just too afraid to let it.
A year later, at Trinity College in Dublin, Marianne and Connell once again find themselves in each other’s orbit, this time under different circumstances: Marianne has easily found her footing among the privileged members of Dublin’s intellectual upper class, while Connell struggles to reconcile his old sense of identity with the new one expected of him at university. Once again, Marianne and Connell find themselves drawn to each other amid material circumstances and deep inner turmoil that seem bent on keeping them apart.
2021
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Alice Kelleher is a financially successful and critically acclaimed novelist on the cusp of her thirties. Her best friend, Eileen Lydon, is an underpaid editor at a literary journal. Both are on the brink of a new chapter in life. Alice has just met Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. Meanwhile, Eileen is back in Dublin getting over a break-up and flirting with Simon, whom she has known since childhood.
In this character-driven novel, Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon navigate the complexities of life, friendships, and sex in their late twenties. No longer young and dumb, but far from having it all figured out, their existences are mired in intense anxiety, intense feeling, intense anticipation. Is there something more to life, or is this all there is? Is the beautiful world they once dreamt of still out there, waiting for them?
2024
Intermezzo: A Novel
Peter and Ivan Koubek may be related, but most of they time, they find it hard to relate. Peter is a successful Dublin lawyer in his thirties, eternally confident and capable. At twenty-two, socially-awkward competitive chess player Ivan feels worlds away from his charismatic older brother. Then their father dies, and everything changes.
Suddenly, Peter is medicating himself to sleep and clumsily juggling relationships with two women: devil-may-care college student Naomi and his perennial first love, Sylvia. Ivan, meanwhile, enters an entanglement of his own with Margaret, an older woman trying to put her tumultuous past behind her.
Intermezzo is the story of five people at crossroads in their lives, pushing and pulling each other in different directions as they each struggle to carve out a new path forward. At the heart of it is two grieving brothers, so different, yet so alike in their search for wholeness, acceptance, and love.
