Normal People (Hardback)

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2018

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019

Chosen as one of our Waterstones’ Best Books to Look Out for in September.

Marianne is the young, affluent, intellectual wallflower; Connell is the boy everyone likes, shadowed by his family’s reputation and poverty. Unlikely friends, and later lovers, their small town beginnings in rural Ireland are swiftly eclipsed by the heady worlds of student Dublin. Gradually their intense, mismatched love becomes a battleground of power, class, and the falsehoods they choose to believe.

Normal People is a tale of deceptive simplicity, a very accessible narrative of two seemingly mismatched young people who share a profound, inescapable understanding. Beyond that however is something properly universal, a study of how one person can forever shape and impact another. Marianne and Connell emerge almost shockingly real and deeply vulnerable in their different ways.

Following her incandescent debut Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney has quickly evolved into perhaps the most nuanced contemporary observer we have. Brimming with longing, regret and intimacy, Normal People is everything we keep saying as a culture we need from our fiction. It is a story that is absolutely universal to us all, and it is brilliant.

"Normal People is fiction at its brightest and most inclusive in a universally relatable modern romance which has been a favourite amongst our booksellers and customers. Clever yet unpretentious, literary yet highly approachable, it is that rare gift of a novel which can be enjoyed by readers of all tastes." – Bea Carvalho, Waterstones Fiction Buyer