#39 in Literary fiction
Normal People
- 304
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 10 weeks on the list, peaked at #4
- Irish Book Awards
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Our view
“Normal People” divides readers, and the split is the best guide to it. Those it wins over find a painfully precise study of loneliness and of two people who cannot believe they deserve love; others see little plot, a good deal of sex and a couple whose troubles would end if they simply spoke honestly. Pick it up for mood and psychology, not for a conventional romance.
Worth knowing Sally Rooney’s second novel grew out of an earlier short story about the same two characters and was published in 2018. It follows Connell and Marianne from school in a small town in County Sligo to Trinity College Dublin, and, like her other books, it uses no quotation marks for dialogue. It won the Costa Novel Award, and Rooney co-wrote the 2020 television series with Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Normal People is a 2018 novel by the Irish author Sally Rooney. Normal People is Rooney's second novel, published after Conversations with Friends (2017). It was first published by Faber & Faber on 30 August 2018. The book became a bestseller in the United States, selling almost 64,000 copies in hardcover in its first four months of release. It was also a bestseller in China, where its coming of age theme was popular with younger readers. A critically acclaimed and Emmy nominated television adaptation of the same name aired from April 2020 on BBC Three and Hulu. A number of publications ranked it one of the best books of the 2010s.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.4 across 2,167 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 94% of the weight and the score stays at 7.4 — the Literary fiction average of 8.1 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.0 | 78 | 4% |
| Hardcover | 7.4 | 2.1K | 96% |
Frequently asked
How long is Normal People?
It has 304 pages — shorter than 93% of the ranked books in Literary fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Literary fiction — with scores between 7.3 and 8.3, closest to this book.
