Following the success of her debut novel Conversations With Friends, Faber & Faber will publish the second novel by Mayo-born author Sally Rooney in September.
Normal People is described as 'the story of Connell and Marianne, who grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland – but they are from very different worlds. Connell's mother works as a cleaner in Marianne's family home. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years.'
Since its publication in 2017, Rooney's Conversation With Friends, has been greeted with unanimous critical praise - New York Magazine described it as 'a novel of delicious frictions delivered at a low heat'. The book was named as a Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for Newcomer of the Year 2017. Rooney was also the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2017.
Earlier this week, Sex And The City star Sarah Jessica Parker sang its praises on Instagram.
‘This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person’s life – a simple yet profound realization that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel," says Mitzi Angel, Rooney's publisher at Faber & Faber. "It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us – blazingly – about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege. Alternating menace with overwhelming tenderness, Sally Rooney’s second novel breathes fiction with new life."
Last November, Rooney was announced as the new Editor of Dublin literary journal The Stinging Fly, an early champion of her work - in 2010, they printed two of her poems, submitted while she was still in secondary school in County Mayo. Her first issue as editor will be published this summer.
