Conversations with Friends: A Novel

Front Cover
Crown, Jul 11, 2017 - Fiction - 336 pages
NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • From the New York Times bestselling author of Normal People . . . “[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE TIME 100 NEXT LIST • WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vogue, Slate • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Elle


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.

Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

“Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”—Celeste Ng, Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast

“The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”—Curtis Sittenfeld, The Week

“Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions.”New York

“A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

“This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”—Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
22
Section 3
34
Section 4
41
Section 5
45
Section 6
50
Section 7
62
Section 8
72
Section 18
176
Section 19
177
Section 20
184
Section 21
238
Section 22
241
Section 23
247
Section 24
253
Section 25
264

Section 9
79
Section 10
88
Section 11
107
Section 12
112
Section 13
122
Section 14
130
Section 15
143
Section 16
166
Section 17
167
Section 26
271
Section 27
282
Section 28
292
Section 29
295
Section 30
313
Section 31
314
Section 32
317
Copyright

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About the author (2017)

Sally Rooney was born in the west of Ireland in 1991. Her work has appeared in The New YorkerThe New York TimesGranta and The London Review of Books. Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, she is the author of Conversations with Friends. In 2019, she was named to the inaugural Time 100 Next list.

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