Announcing the new novel from Sally Rooney
We’re thrilled to announce that we will publish the second novel by Sally Rooney, winner of the PFD/Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in September.
Normal People is 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.
Mitzi Angel, Publisher at Faber & Faber, said: ‘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. 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.’
Faber & Faber acquired UK & Commonwealth rights from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends, was a Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard Book of the Year. The novel has been longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize, and shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award: Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year 2017, and the Books Are My Bag Readers Choice Award 2017. Rooney was the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award 2017.
Sally Rooney’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The White Review, The Dublin Review, Stonecutter and The Winter Pages anthology. She is the editor of The Stinging Fly magazine. She lives in Dublin. Follow her @sallyrooney