---
product_id: 177123257
title: "Normal People: A Novel"
price: "AED 79"
currency: AED
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reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.ae/products/177123257-normal-people-a-novel
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---

# Normal People: A Novel

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- **What is this?** Normal People: A Novel
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## Description

NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • “A stunning novel about the transformative power of relationships” ( People ) from the author of Conversations with Friends, “a master of the literary page-turner” (J. Courtney Sullivan). “[A] novel that demands to be read compulsively, in one sitting.”— The Washington Post ONE OF ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY ’S TEN BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: People, Slate, The New York Public Library, Harvard Crimson 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 is the story of mutual fascination, friendship, and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t. WINNER: The British Book Award, The Costa Book Award, The An Post Irish Novel of the Year, Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times , The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Vogue, Esquire, Glamour, Elle, Marie Claire, Vox, The Paris Review, Good Housekeeping, Town & Country

Review: A masterfully-written novel about young love in the 21st Century - Do you ever consider the profound impact significant others have on your life? Decades ago, when our son was toddlerish, my husband and I took him into the country for a weekend. We rented a tiny, Eskom-free stone cottage in a dark valley. One night, with the boy asleep, we sat outside, dazzled by the night sky, and drank a bottle of wine. We’d been a couple for more than a decade by then and somehow began talking about how being together had shaped us as individuals and influenced our life decisions. It was a gentle, but remarkably illuminating discussion for both of us and about both of us. It's a conversation I regularly replay to myself to remember how lucky I am. I thought a great deal about that night as I read Sally Rooney’s novel, Normal People last week. Normal People tells the story about Marianne and Connell’s relationship, which begins when they’re at school in a small town in West Ireland and continues – on and off – for another four years while they’re at college in Dublin. It’s a tale with so many layers that, while my experience of reading it bordered on compulsive, I find it difficult to analyse – suffice to say that it’s not about the plot; it’s about the characters and their inner lives, and the writing. Rooney, who is 27-years-old, is widely feted as the next best thing, “one of the most exciting voices to emerge in an already crackerjack new generation of Irish writers”, and a “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”. I don’t dispute the praise. Her writing is extraordinarily elegant. Confident and uncluttered, it conveys an immediacy and ingenuousness that drew me in and held me from beginning to end, which came too soon. The story, I felt – shocked to discover I'd reached the final full stop – was unfinished, there were loose ends to tuck away. But, once I recovered, I realised the way it ends is part of its magic. Real relationships are forever evolving, eternally incomplete, and so it figures that a novel about relationships will be too. Normal People is told from both Marianne’s and Connell’s points of view. It reminded me how, no matter how well you think you know a person, your perceptions and understanding of what they say and mean can be skewed. The novel also shows how our identity, self-esteem and who we become as adults are bound to our upbringing – indefinitely. Marianne is from a wealthy, but unloving and dysfunctional family. Connell is from a poor, but loving family. It largely shapes who they are and how they relate to the world. The novel also examines the impact of bullying – both on victims and perpetrators. Ironically, I might not find the book easy to analyse, but I could go on forever, waffling about the many layers in Normal People. I daren’t though because then you might not feel compelled to read the book yourself, which would be a pity. A huge pity. Here’s a tiny sample of the writing to demonstrate what a humungous pity it would be: “Helen has given Connell a new way to live. It’s as if an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air. It is physically possible to type and send a message reading: I love you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact it’s easy. Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life. He can sit down to dinner with Helen’s parents, he can accompany her to her friends’ parties, he can tolerate the smiling and the exchange of repetitive conversation. He can squeeze her hand while people ask him questions about his future. When she touches him spontaneously, applying a little pressure to his arm, or even reaching to brush a piece of lint off his collar, he feels a rush of pride, and hopes that people are watching them. To be known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward." I’m not sure I feel changed after reading Normal People, but I do feel upgraded. And reminded about how life is a series of relationships, and how a few of them help shape who we are and how we live our lives. And that thinking about that and acknowledging those who positively influence us is important. And yes, Sally Rooney has a fan in me. My current read is her first novel, Conversations with Friends.
Review: Unexpectedly Moving - Here is one instance in which having seen the series before reading the book was NOT a conflict. The Hulu series almost completely honored the content and format of the book. The advantage of the book was understanding the thoughts going through the characters' minds in their moments of silent examination of one another. I really enjoyed the series, and I enjoyed the book even more. As is nearly always the case, the book offers more depth to the characters, but I think the casting was perfect and it was gratifying to see a book and a series so in line with one another. Anyway, this is a review about the book, not the show. I've seen some unflattering reviews that say the book is meaningless and fluffy drivel, and that the characters are flat and dull. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think that the characters and the story successfully convey what it means to feel isolated and different. They're not lively and bubbly because the book is all about being abnormal and unable to fit in. The whole point is that they are people who don't fall into many of the facets of standard social norms and therefore they cling to each other and keep going back to each other throughout the years. Rooney covers topics of mental, physical and sexual abuse with discretion and respect, and never once makes it exploitative for the sake of conflict and building tension. I love that she doesn't use the standard form of dialogue with breaks and quotation marks. I've seen some complaints about that stylistic choice, but I think it was the perfect choice for a book about people who are so much in their own heads and unable to properly convey themselves to anyone but each other. I've also seen some complaints about Rooney's prose, or lack thereof. I'm flabbergasted by that. There are some bits that are nearly poetic in their beauty, and some bits that so perfectly capture the human condition and the frail psyche of the depressed and downtrodden. It was not a perfect book, but it's one that I would confidently recommend and likely one that I will read again.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #1,547 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #26 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books) #43 in Psychological Fiction (Books) #105 in Literary Fiction (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.1 out of 5 stars 135,598 Reviews |

## Images

![Normal People: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81kT0cJ+xQL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A masterfully-written novel about young love in the 21st Century
*by P***Y on October 1, 2018*

Do you ever consider the profound impact significant others have on your life? Decades ago, when our son was toddlerish, my husband and I took him into the country for a weekend. We rented a tiny, Eskom-free stone cottage in a dark valley. One night, with the boy asleep, we sat outside, dazzled by the night sky, and drank a bottle of wine. We’d been a couple for more than a decade by then and somehow began talking about how being together had shaped us as individuals and influenced our life decisions. It was a gentle, but remarkably illuminating discussion for both of us and about both of us. It's a conversation I regularly replay to myself to remember how lucky I am. I thought a great deal about that night as I read Sally Rooney’s novel, Normal People last week. Normal People tells the story about Marianne and Connell’s relationship, which begins when they’re at school in a small town in West Ireland and continues – on and off – for another four years while they’re at college in Dublin. It’s a tale with so many layers that, while my experience of reading it bordered on compulsive, I find it difficult to analyse – suffice to say that it’s not about the plot; it’s about the characters and their inner lives, and the writing. Rooney, who is 27-years-old, is widely feted as the next best thing, “one of the most exciting voices to emerge in an already crackerjack new generation of Irish writers”, and a “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”. I don’t dispute the praise. Her writing is extraordinarily elegant. Confident and uncluttered, it conveys an immediacy and ingenuousness that drew me in and held me from beginning to end, which came too soon. The story, I felt – shocked to discover I'd reached the final full stop – was unfinished, there were loose ends to tuck away. But, once I recovered, I realised the way it ends is part of its magic. Real relationships are forever evolving, eternally incomplete, and so it figures that a novel about relationships will be too. Normal People is told from both Marianne’s and Connell’s points of view. It reminded me how, no matter how well you think you know a person, your perceptions and understanding of what they say and mean can be skewed. The novel also shows how our identity, self-esteem and who we become as adults are bound to our upbringing – indefinitely. Marianne is from a wealthy, but unloving and dysfunctional family. Connell is from a poor, but loving family. It largely shapes who they are and how they relate to the world. The novel also examines the impact of bullying – both on victims and perpetrators. Ironically, I might not find the book easy to analyse, but I could go on forever, waffling about the many layers in Normal People. I daren’t though because then you might not feel compelled to read the book yourself, which would be a pity. A huge pity. Here’s a tiny sample of the writing to demonstrate what a humungous pity it would be: “Helen has given Connell a new way to live. It’s as if an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air. It is physically possible to type and send a message reading: I love you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact it’s easy. Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life. He can sit down to dinner with Helen’s parents, he can accompany her to her friends’ parties, he can tolerate the smiling and the exchange of repetitive conversation. He can squeeze her hand while people ask him questions about his future. When she touches him spontaneously, applying a little pressure to his arm, or even reaching to brush a piece of lint off his collar, he feels a rush of pride, and hopes that people are watching them. To be known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward." I’m not sure I feel changed after reading Normal People, but I do feel upgraded. And reminded about how life is a series of relationships, and how a few of them help shape who we are and how we live our lives. And that thinking about that and acknowledging those who positively influence us is important. And yes, Sally Rooney has a fan in me. My current read is her first novel, Conversations with Friends.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Unexpectedly Moving
*by T***. on August 11, 2022*

Here is one instance in which having seen the series before reading the book was NOT a conflict. The Hulu series almost completely honored the content and format of the book. The advantage of the book was understanding the thoughts going through the characters' minds in their moments of silent examination of one another. I really enjoyed the series, and I enjoyed the book even more. As is nearly always the case, the book offers more depth to the characters, but I think the casting was perfect and it was gratifying to see a book and a series so in line with one another. Anyway, this is a review about the book, not the show. I've seen some unflattering reviews that say the book is meaningless and fluffy drivel, and that the characters are flat and dull. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think that the characters and the story successfully convey what it means to feel isolated and different. They're not lively and bubbly because the book is all about being abnormal and unable to fit in. The whole point is that they are people who don't fall into many of the facets of standard social norms and therefore they cling to each other and keep going back to each other throughout the years. Rooney covers topics of mental, physical and sexual abuse with discretion and respect, and never once makes it exploitative for the sake of conflict and building tension. I love that she doesn't use the standard form of dialogue with breaks and quotation marks. I've seen some complaints about that stylistic choice, but I think it was the perfect choice for a book about people who are so much in their own heads and unable to properly convey themselves to anyone but each other. I've also seen some complaints about Rooney's prose, or lack thereof. I'm flabbergasted by that. There are some bits that are nearly poetic in their beauty, and some bits that so perfectly capture the human condition and the frail psyche of the depressed and downtrodden. It was not a perfect book, but it's one that I would confidently recommend and likely one that I will read again.

### ⭐⭐⭐ I wanted to like this more, but ...
*by B***M on September 11, 2019*

Rooney is an interesting writer and a talented one. She embraces a variety of stylistic eccentricities that weren't off-putting per se (including dispensing with quotes for dialog), but in retrospect, seem somewhat contrived, perhaps to mark her as "different" among her literary peers. Her prose capturez moods and emotions compellingly, and despite the novel's shortcomings, I found it very readable and engaging to a degree. So I really did want to give this a strong write-up, but by the end, I was mostly exhausted and irritated by the two main characters and their myriad and inconsistent neuroses. Here's Connell at the start: the much loved son of a working-class single mom, smart, athletic and popular (the high school trifecta, even in Ireland I'd guess) and seemingly completely indifferent to knowing anything about his biological dad, including who he is. It's mentioned once and then never again. How odd is that? Does it explain his unwillingness to be seen with Marianne even though he otherwise comes across as confident and cool, and unafraid to go against the grain. Does it explain his total breakdown and flirtation with suicidal thoughts later -- a shift I found shocking without any real run-up other than the suicide of what seemed a casual high school friend. Then a few months later, he's back on track, again inexplicably. Then there's Marianne whose shifts seem even more radically unbelievable: She's invisible at school or disliked (it's not totally clear which) and yet appears totally indifferent to the scorn or unfriendliness of her peers while also yearning for some human connection. She's above or outside the social fray and believes herself a superior being on one level, yet consumed by self-hatred on another level. We learn she's a victim of abuse (father, brother physically, maybe sexually?) and mother (verbally and emotionally). So she's a mess -- yet once at Trinity, suddenly popular, beautiful, admired. How does that happen? Why did it happen? Then within months, maybe a year, loses friends, is talked about scornfully and negatively, dips in a sado-masochistic relationship in Sweden and yearns to be submissive, but never with anyone who professes to love her (although Connell seems outside that equation). Again, what? Why? Marianne in particular wants to know she's special -- NOT normal -- while Connell seems to embrace a sense of normality as an occasional blessing (granted to him by a girlfriend, for instance) but normalcy is never part of what connects him and Marianne in a relationship that is both affecting and deeply dispiriting. It's clear they do love each other, but even at the end (and I hated the end) it's not clear what keeps them apart. Is their love unreal? Unsustainable? Abnormal in some way? Is she being noble and unselfish to send him off to study in the US? Is the last line a suggestion they will ultimately have a relationship that looks more "normal" (to play off Rooney's always ironic use of the word). Or is she simply giving up on herself in some weird and mad form of submission. Ultimately, it's impossible to know and sadly, by that point, I didn't care.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Normal People: A Novel
- Beautiful World, Where Are You
- Conversations with Friends: A Novel

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