Recommendations
Books Like Normal People
What to read after Normal People by Sally Rooney
If Normal People's portrait of Connell and Marianne — the loop of their relationship over four years, the class dynamics, the prose that renders interiority so precisely — left you wanting more, these are the books readers find next.
- 1Buy
Conversations with Friends
by Sally Rooney
Rooney's debut — Frances, a college student in Dublin, begins an affair with a married actor while her ex-girlfriend remains her closest friend. The place to go for more Rooney: the same prose, the same interest in power dynamics and class, a different relationship structure.
- 2Buy
Beautiful World, Where Are You
by Sally Rooney
Rooney's third novel follows Alice, a novelist, and Eileen, her best friend, through emails and meetings as both try to figure out what they want from their lives. More expansive and philosophical than Normal People, with the same interest in the specific difficulty of contemporary intimacy.
- 3Buy
Attachments
by Rainbow Rowell
An IT employee falls in love with a woman through reading her emails. Rowell writes contemporary relationships with the same interiority Rooney does — a warmer American register where Rooney's is cooler and more Irish, but the same attention to what people don't say and what they communicate anyway.
- 4Buy
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
by Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant's severely regimented life is disrupted by a musician she becomes obsessed with and a coworker who keeps being kind to her. Less specifically about romance than Normal People but shares the same interest in the specific texture of a person who cannot quite reach the world around them.
- 5Buy
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
A beautiful, privileged woman in 2000-era Manhattan spends a year trying to sleep through her own life. The American literary dark comedy version of the privileged-and-yet-unreachable protagonist Rooney writes about — less warm, more satirical, and operating in the same emotional register of a person who cannot feel what they're supposed to feel.
- 6Buy
Daisy Jones and the Six
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
An oral history of a 1970s rock band — told through interviews with the surviving members decades later. Shares Normal People's interest in two people who are inexplicably connected and keep finding each other, in a completely different genre register.
- 7Buy
An Education
by Lynn Barber
A British journalist's memoir about being 16 in 1960s Oxford and falling for a glamorous older man who turned out to be deceiving her — a very short book about a very specific class of mistake that Marianne in Normal People would recognize.
- 8Buy
The Normal Heart
by Larry Kramer
Kramer's semi-autobiographical play about the early AIDS crisis in New York — not similar in style to Normal People, but one of the great literary examinations of what it means to love someone in a context that makes love impossible to straightforwardly express.
More Normal People Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.