Conversations with Friends

If Normal People is Rooney distilled, Conversations with Friends is Rooney unfiltered: messier, funnier, and a little more dangerous.

Why Consider This One

Rooney’s debut follows Frances, a 21-year-old poet and university student in Dublin, as she and her ex-girlfriend Bobbi get drawn into the lives of an older married couple, the writer Melissa and the actor Nick. What starts as a flirtation between Frances and Nick becomes an affair that reshapes all four relationships at once, and Rooney tracks the fallout with the same cool, exacting eye she’d later bring to Normal People, just aimed at a wider, messier cast.

Pick this one if you want more plot and more people in the room: love triangles, class tension, endometriosis, and email correspondence that doubles as emotional combat. It’s a touch longer and more sprawling than Normal People, and Frances is a prickier, less immediately sympathetic narrator than Marianne, which is exactly what makes the novel rewarding on a second read.

What to Expect

A first-person narrator who is smarter than she is kind to herself, told in the same spare, unpunctuated dialogue style Rooney would refine later. The novel moves through emails and text messages as much as scenes, and the emotional stakes creep up slowly before landing hard in the final third. Read it after Normal People and you’ll see where her obsessions started.