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Sally Rooney is an Irish screenwriter and author of literary fiction and contemporary women’s fiction.

Best known for writing books such as Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), her writing brings to the forefront themes of class inequality, intimacy, art, and politics.

Born in Castlebar, County Mayo, Ireland, she attended Trinity College Dublin where she graduated with a degree in English literature.

An unapologetically Marxist, Rooney's political beliefs feature strongly in her literary works.

Her novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People have both been adapted into motion pictures.

Named the 2017 Young Writer of the Year by The Sunday Times, Rooney's works have received numerous accolades.

This includes the 2018 Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year for Normal People, and the 2022 Dalkey Literary Awards Novel of the Year prize for Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Rooney was also credited with co-writing the TV adaptation of Normal People aired on the BBC in 2020.

More about Sally Rooney

Genres: Contemporary , Literary Fiction, Women's Fiction

Born: 1991

Ireland

Non Series

  • Conversations with Friends (2017)
  • Normal People (2018)
  • Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021)

Collections

  1. Six Shorts 2017 (2017)

Novellas

  1. Mr Salary (2016)

Omnibus Books

  1. The Promise / How Emotions Are Made / Heaven is for Real / Normal People (2022)

Plays

  1. Normal People: The Scripts (2020)
Collections
Novellas

Detailed book overview

Non Series

Conversations with Friends

Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.

Conversations with Friends
Director: Lenny Abrahamson, Leanne Welham
Cast: Alison Oliver, Sasha Lane, Joe Alwyn, Jemima Kirke, Alex Murphy, Tommy Tiernan, Justine Mitchell, Tadhg Murphy, Sallay Garnett
Author: Sally Rooney
First Release: 2017
ISBN: 978-0451499066
Publisher: Hogarth
Normal People

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.

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 at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And 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.

Normal People
Director: Lenny Abrahamson, Hettie Macdonald
Cast: Paul Mescal, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Desmond Eastwood, Aislín McGuckin, Sarah Greene, Frank Blake, India Mullen, Eliot Salt, Éanna Hardwicke, Seán Doyle, Fionn O'Shea, Clinton Liberty
Author: Sally Rooney
First Release: 2018
ISBN: 978-1984822185
Publisher: Random House
Beautiful World, Where Are You

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 breakup, 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?

Author: Sally Rooney
First Release: 2021
ISBN: 978-1250859044
Publisher: Picador

Collections

Six Shorts 2017

This year's six shortlisted stories for the world's richest short story prize, the £30,000 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is the world's most prestigious and richest short story prize, worth £30,000 to the winner. Past winners and shortlisted authors have included the Pulitzer winners Junot Díaz, Anthony Doerr and Adam Johnson, plus Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith, Yiyun Li, CK Stead and Elizabeth Strout.

Six Shorts 2017 brings together the six stories shortlisted for this year's award: ‘Reputation Management’ by Kathleen Alcott; ‘Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows about Horses’ by Bret Anthony Johnston; ‘The Hazel Twig and the Olive Tree’ by Richard Lambert; ‘The Tenant’ by Victor Lodato; ‘Every Little Thing’ by Celeste Ng; and ‘Mr Salary’ by Sally Rooney.

Chosen by a hugely experienced and prestigious judging panel that included Booker-winner Anne Enright, Orange- and Whitbread-winner Rose Tremain, Booker-shortlistee Neel Mukherjee and critic and novelist Mark Lawson, the six stories represent the very best in contemporary English-language short fiction.

Author: Sally Rooney
First Release: 2017
Ebook: B06XS26T6D
Publisher: Times Books

Novellas

Mr Salary

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.

Author: Sally Rooney
First Release: 2016
ISBN: 978-0571351954
Publisher: Faber & Faber

Omnibus Books

The Promise / How Emotions Are Made / Heaven is for Real / Normal People

The Promise, Normal People, How Emotions Are Made, Heaven is for Real 4 Books Collection Set:

The Promise:

On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least their treatment of the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. Salome was to be given her own house, her own land...yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored.

Normal People:

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins. 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.

How Emotions Are Made:

Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind. “Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science.”—The Wall Street Journal “A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented.”—Scientific American.

Heaven is for Real:

Colton told his parents he left his body during an emergency surgery–and proved that claim by describing exactly what his parents were doing in another part of the hospital during his operation. He talked of visiting heaven and described events that happened before he was born and how he spoke with family members he’d never met.

Author: Sally Rooney
First Release: 2022
ISBN: 978-9124202224
Publisher: Random House UK

Plays

Normal People: The Scripts

“You know, I did used to think that I could read your mind at times.”

“In bed you mean.”

“Yeah. And afterwards but I dunno maybe that's normal.”

“It’s not.”

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular. Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation, something life-changing begins.

With an introduction by director Lenny Abrahamson and featuring iconic images from the show, Normal People: The Scripts contains the complete screenplays of the acclaimed Emmy- and Golden Globe–nominated television drama that The New York Times called “an unusually thoughtful and moving depiction of young people’s emotional lives.”

Author: Sally Rooney
First Release: 2020
Ebook: B08WC95KQZ
Publisher: Hogarth