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[Rooney] has been hailed as the first great millennial novelist for her stories of love and late capitalism...One of the unusual pleasures of Rooney’s novels is watching young women engage in a casual intellectual hooliganism, demolishing every mediocrity that crosses their paths, just for the fun of it… in the process creating some of the best dialogue I’ve read.
— The New Yorker
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I’m transfixed by the way Rooney works, and I’m hardly the only one… like any confident couturier, she’s slicing the free flow of words into the perfect shape… She writes about tricky commonplace things (text messages, sex) with a familiarity no one else has.
— The Paris Review
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...This superb book more than lives up to the high expectations set for it by Rooney's lauded first novel...Showcasing Rooney's focus and ability in building characterrelationships that are as subtle and infinite as real-life ones, and her perceptive portrayal of class, Normal People gets at the hard work of becoming a person and the near impossibility of knowing if a first love is a true one.
— Booklist (starred)
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I went into a tunnel with this book and didn’t want to come out. Absolutely engrossing and surprisingly heart-breaking with more depth, subtlety, and insight than any one novel deserves. Young love is a subject of much scorn, but Rooney understands the cataclysmic effects our youth has on the people we become. She has restored not only love’s dignity, but also its significance.
— Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
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Sally Rooney's Normal People is the deeply felt story of a foundational relationship at the margin of friendship and true love, of shame and devotion. This inventive and profound novel proves what great fiction can do--it can open a world at the seams.
— Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers and The Vacationers
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I couldn’t put Normal People down—I didn’t think I could love it as much as Conversations with Friends, but I did. Sally Rooney is a treasure. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
— Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and The Possessed
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"Sally Rooney is a master of the literary page-turner. In Normal People, she has once again crafted a complicated love story that's impossible to put down. It's also full of wise observations about class, gender roles and how the past shapes the present. Rooney's novels are populated with characters and situations that feel at once totally familiar and like something we've never seen in fiction before.
— J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Saints for All Occasions
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A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style… [O]ne wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge… But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.
— The New Yorker
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Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes…a novel of delicious frictions.
— New York Magazine
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I love debuts where you just can’t believe that it was a debut… Conversations with Friends paints a nuanced, page-turning portrait of a whip-smart university student in the throes of an affair with an older married man.
— Zadie Smith, Elle
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“The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.
— Curtis Sittenfeld, The Week
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“Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.
— Celeste Ng, "Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast"
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“This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I'm not alone.
— Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)
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“The self-deceptions of a new generation are at the core of Sally Rooney’s debut, Conversations With Friends (Hogarth), which captures something wonderfully odd-cornered and real in the story of an Irish millennial…
— Megan O'Grady, Vogue's 10 Best Books of 2017
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[A] bracing, miraculous debut.
— The Millions
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It is time to take a sharp inhale, people. After the success of Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney has produced a second novel, Normal People which will be just as successful as it deserves to be: it is superb...[T]he truth is that this novel is about human connection and I found it difficult to disconnect. It is a long time since I cared so much about two characters on a page.
— Anne Enright, The Irish Times
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Rooney homes in on what she’s best at – describing people, with all their conceits and self-delusions, weaknesses and virtues. She does this with unsparing acuity and extraordinary sensitivity… There’s arch humor in her insights too.
— The Times (UK)
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Beautifully observed and profoundly moving, I could scale new heights of hyperbole trying to describe how good this book is, but really, you just need to read it.
— The Bookseller (UK)
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“Aoife McMahon, a skillful actor with a gorgeous Irish accent, makes each personality idiosyncratic and believable and perfectly captures their confusion at being young and emotionally innocent…Rooney’s subtle writing and engrossing plot work with McMahon’s nimble and witty performance to balance your sympathies on a knife edge between these unforgettable characters. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile