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After Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney once again dazzles us with a story about the mutual fascination between two people who can't quite connect.

Winner of the Costa Novel Award.
Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Marianne and Connell are classmates in high school but never speak to each other. He's one of the popular kids and she's a loner who has learned to keep her distance from everyone else. Everyone knows Marianne lives in a mansion and that Connell's mother cleans it, but no one imagines that the two young people meet every afternoon. One of those days, an awkward conversation will kick off a relationship that could change their lives.

Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, of friendship and love between two people who can't quite connect, a reflection on the difficulty of changing who we are. Sally Rooney's second novel follows two magnetic and complex protagonists for years, two young people whom we come to understand even in their most striking contradictions and their gravest misunderstandings. This is a bittersweet story that shows how sex and power shape us, the desire to hurt and be hurt, to love and be loved. Our relationships are a conversation over time. Our silences, what defines them.