Sally Rooney's 3 best books

The brilliant and precocious literary irruption of Sally rooney with his «Normal People«, Placed it at the level of what it also supposed relatively recently Joel dicker. And prejudices about youth aside, both authors seem to have come to stay. Basically because to get to write a book that convinces so many people before the age of thirty, points to the narrative genius.

In the case of this Irish author the thing takes very different paths to those of Dicker. But there is an interesting underlying analogy in both. Because everyone tells their story always with perspective, with a vision extended for years. Thus tracing an argument that covers almost a lifetime, a complete transformation, a consequence after an election with all its ramifications.

Maybe that's the current best-seller trick. We can have the best story but if we cannot project it to a long term that gives it that existential significance, failure appears as a more than considerable possibility in the already difficult intention of being a bestseller.

The point is that Sally has already begun to tell us her love and heartbreak stories as balances inherent to our human condition. And in his youth we deciphered that wisdom forgotten over the years, the lucidity of passions not yet tamed by impositions, customs and other censures.

Top recommended novels of Sally Rooney

Normal people

Normality could end up being a longed-for exception that we all pretend to be. In that space as common as it is inaccessible of the normal thing, the beings that we never were and the stereotypes of perfection that we can never become end up inhabiting. Everything else is this normality that Rooney strives to make us understand as his own at the cost of drawing us into the personalities of Marianne and Connell.

Marianne and Connell are high school classmates but they don't speak. He is one of the popular ones and she is a lonely girl who has learned to stay away from other people.

Everyone knows that Marianne lives in a mansion and that Connell's mother takes care of its cleaning, but no one imagines that every afternoon the two young people coincide. One of those days, an awkward conversation will start a relationship that could change their lives.

Normal people is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love between two people who cannot find each other, a reflection on the difficulty of changing who we are.

Sally Rooney's second novel accompanies two complex and magnetic protagonists for years, two young people who we come to understand even in their most notorious contradictions and in their most serious 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.

Normal people

Where are you, beautiful world

Without a doubt, beauty must be sought. Because it exists. Because in opposition to the horror that on many occasions marks our hours, there must be the beauty that causes happiness by its mere contemplation and experience ... We are all in this, hunting for that flash that appears as full beauty and therefore fleeting but complete happiness.

Two friends are approaching thirty in different cities and with distant life trajectories. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him to travel to Rome with her. Eileen, her best friend, tries to get over a breakup in Dublin by flirting with Simon, a childhood friend.

As summer approaches, they exchange e-mails about their friendship, art, literature, the world around them, their complex love stories and the transition to an adult life that awaits them just around the corner. They say they want to see each other soon, but what will happen when they do? Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young, but they will soon be out of it. They get together and separate, they want each other and they lie to each other. They have sex, they suffer for their friendships and for the world in which they live. Are they in the last lit room before dark? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Where are you, beautiful world

Conversations between friends

Sally Rooney's surprise came with this novel that appeared as a good romantic novel typical of a youthful narrator but that ended up breaking like a modern Decameron, led from the undoubted freshness of a twenty-year-old writer but prolonged towards all the channels that love can take when its waters descend with fierceness.

After reciting their poems at a literary evening in Dublin, Frances and Bobbi meet Melissa, an attractive writer who wants to publish a report about them. These two university students who were a couple in the past will be attracted to her and her husband Nick: a wealthy couple who are nearing their quarantine and with which they will end up forming a complex menage a quatre.

Set in Irish artistic bohemianism, this tale of free love and ambiguous relationships offers an honest portrait of a generation that rejects imposed labels.

Between book launches, theatrical premieres and holidays in Brittany, the characters' conversations turn Sally Rooney's debut into a novel of ideas marked by witty dialogue and a clever sense of humor. The author investigates the delicate cruelties of human interaction in an intelligent work on friendship, desire and jealousy.

As his characters discover the power they have over others, Rooney articulates an addictive story about how innocence works, the impact of infidelity, and the mirage of free will.

Conversations Between Friends has established Rooney as one of the most promising voices of his generation. A sharp and revealing work that is at once a novel of initiation, a comedy about love and a feminist plea.

Conversations between friends
5/5 - (8 votes)

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