Recommendations
Books Like Conversations with Friends
What to read after Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends is a debut novel about desire, class, and the gap between what people feel and what they say — told with a flat, observational precision that has made Rooney one of the most discussed novelists of her generation. These eight books share that same quality of close, unsentimental attention to the texture of contemporary young adult lives.
- 1Buy
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
Rooney's second novel — a love story between two Irish teenagers across several years; more emotionally accessible than Conversations with Friends and more widely loved, but the same voice and the same interest in desire, class, and what gets left unsaid
- 2Buy
Beautiful World, Where Are You
by Sally Rooney
Rooney's third novel — two friends and their respective love interests exchange long emails about what art and meaning can possibly mean in contemporary life; more essayistic but the same flat, affectless voice
- 3Buy
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
A privileged young woman in New York who wants to disappear — same flat, observational prose and same interest in emotional paralysis in a beautiful, alienated young woman who seems to have everything and feels nothing
- 4Buy
The Idiot
by Elif Batuman
A Harvard freshman in 1995 who falls in love with a Hungarian student and learns almost nothing from the experience — same quality of a very intelligent narrator observing herself with detachment, same flat prose and same examination of desire and its gaps with communication
- 5Buy
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Four college friends in New York as their careers develop — begins in similar territory to Conversations with Friends but becomes one of the most devastating novels of its decade; same interest in the interior lives of young people navigating intimacy
- 6Buy
Eileen
by Ottessa Moshfegh
A miserable young woman in 1960s Massachusetts whose encounter with a glamorous new coworker changes her life — same quality of first-person alienated interiority, same dark wit
- 7Buy
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Esther Greenwood's mental breakdown in 1950s New York — the canonical literary novel about female alienation that Rooney and Moshfegh are both in dialogue with; still feels immediate
- 8Buy
Exciting Times
by Naoise Dolan
An Irish woman teaching English in Hong Kong who becomes entangled with two people simultaneously — called 'the Rooney-esque novel' on publication; same voice, same interest in what class and desire do to relationships, same minimal emotional register
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