Recommendations
Books Like Normal People
Best books to read after Normal People by Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney's Normal People is the defining literary novel of its generation — Connell and Marianne, on and off from County Sligo to Trinity College Dublin, in Rooney's stripped, dialogue-intensive prose. These recommendations continue the Rooney canon, explore the tradition of the contemporary Irish literary novel, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel about intimacy, class, and the way two people shape each other.
- 1Buy
Conversations with Friends
by Sally Rooney
The companion debut Rooney — Frances and Bobbi, two Dublin college students who become entangled with a married couple; introduces the same stripped prose style and the same interest in power, class, and intimacy that Normal People develops, and many readers find Frances a more intellectually interesting narrator than Connell.
- 2Buy
Beautiful World Where Are You
by Sally Rooney
The third Rooney novel — two women in their thirties (one a novelist, one a literary assistant) navigating friendship, love, and the difficulty of caring about personal happiness in a broken world; Rooney's most self-conscious novel and the one where she most directly addresses the experience of being the most discussed young novelist in the English-speaking world.
- 3Buy
My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel about class and female friendship — Elena and Lila in Naples; the most frequently cited companion for Normal People readers who want the same depth of attention to two women who shape each other across decades, at much greater length and with a historical sweep Normal People doesn't attempt.
- 4Buy
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
The American companion in the tradition of the literary novel addressed to someone who may never read it — Ocean Vuong's letter to his illiterate mother; shares Normal People's interest in the intimacy that cannot quite be spoken and the way class and background shape what we are permitted to feel.
- 5Buy
Exciting Times
by Naoise Dolan
The Dublin companion in the same generation as Normal People — Ava, an Irish woman teaching English in Hong Kong, navigating two relationships; the novel most directly compared to Rooney in prose style, Irish setting, and interest in the power dynamics of young educated people's intimate lives.
- 6Buy
Dept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
The companion in the tradition of the fragmented literary novel about intimacy under pressure — an unnamed narrator's account of her marriage, creative life, and her husband's affair; shares Normal People's interest in the way love is always entangled with power, inadequacy, and the difficulty of saying the true thing.
- 7Buy
Acts of Desperation
by Megan Nolan
The Dublin companion in the tradition of the literary novel about a woman in a self-destructive relationship — Nolan's narrator's obsessive relationship with a Danish man in Dublin; the novel closest to Rooney in generation, setting, and interest in the psychology of romantic self-destruction among young educated Irish women.
- 8Buy
On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel about class and the way education shapes intimacy — On Beauty follows a mixed-race family in a New England university town; shares Normal People's interest in how class background shapes what people feel permitted to want from each other.
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