A love story like no other

  • Book: Normal People
  • Location: Ireland
  • Author: Sally Rooney

Review Author: JustRetiring

Location

Content

Normal People is written by Sally Rooney, a mere 27 years old but a far from normal writer.

With her second novel – longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018 – she has written a love story like no other I’ve ever read.

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but their young lives are very different.

Connell’s mother Lorraine cleans for Marianne’s family. Connell is smart and popular, Marianne is smart, but friendless and abused by her own brother. Despite everything, Connell and Marianne begin a strange sort of relationship, but it’s one that both realise has to be kept secret, for all sorts of youthfully complex reasons.

Both go to Trinity College in Dublin, and the story exquisitely follows their lives over the next few years, together and separately as they struggle to understand what each means to the other, and begin to feel their way around the world.

He put his arm around her waist. He had never, ever touched her in front of anyone else before. Their friends had never seen them together like this, no one had.

You’re happy now, he said. You’re smiling.

You’re right, I am happy.

He nodded towards the pool, where Peggy had just fallen into the water, and people were laughing.

Is this what life is like? Connell said.

She looked at his face, but she couldn’t tell from his expression if he was pleased or miserable. What do you mean? she said. But he only shrugged. A few days later he told her that he was leaving Dublin for the summer.

Exploring themes of class, social mobility, friendship, love, sex and domination, every page of Normal People rips out another little piece of your heart.

Ms Rooney tells Connell and Marianne’s story with spare prose, searing dialogue – without quotation marks – and a literary brilliance way beyond her years. For TripFiction fans, small-town Ireland and more sophisticated Dublin are sensitively contrasted, with the protagonists flip-flopping backwards and forwards, as they search for the place they can be happiest.

I can’t wait to see where the author’s fertile mind takes her – and the reader – next, and I’m off now to order her hugely successful debut novel Conversations with Friends.

Thank you, Sally. And I hope it all works out in the end for Marianne and Connell.

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