Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney
A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.
Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.
Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."
Mr Salary
Sally Rooney
My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.
Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable.
Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed young talents of recent years. With her minute attention to the power dynamics in everyday speech, she builds up sexual tension and throws a deceptively low-key glance at love and death.
Two Stories
Sally Rooney
Two stories about the uncertainties of attraction, from the acclaimed author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends .
Mr Salary is Nathan. Sukie moved in with him years ago because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable.
My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.
In Colour and Light , Aidan and Pauline watch a firework display together. They are almost strangers. But their stumbling connection pains Aidan more than any casual flirtation.
He now feels utterly confused as to why they seem to be arguing, confused to the point of abrupt despair.
Нормальні люди
Sally Rooney
У школі Маріанна з Коннеллом вдають, наче не знають одне одного. Він — популярний та улюблений усіма, вона — самотня дивачка, з якої відкрито насміхаються. Однак між ними виникає дивовижний зв’язок, який вони вирішують тримати в таємниці і який відтоді назавжди змінює їхні життя. Пізніше, у дублінському коледжі, Маріанна впевнено вписується у тамтешнє товариство, а Коннелл незграбно шукає своє місце серед столичної богеми.
За роки навчання вони постійно кружляють одне довкола одного, то віддаляються, то зближуються, але все одно між ними лишається щось, що неймовірним чином притягує їх одне до одного. Поміж іншими стосунками, Маріанниним потягом до саморуйнування, Коннелловою депресією вони випробовують, як далеко можуть зайти у своєму прагненні бути просто собі нормальними людьми і врешті — несподівано врятувати одне одного.
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Normal People
Sally Rooney
At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.