• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2021 August #1
  *Starred Review* Alice, a famous young novelist renting a home on the Irish coast, goes on a date with local Felix, who works in a warehouse, and they don't hit it off at first. Alice's best friend, Eileen, is an editorial assistant at a Dublin-based literary magazine who goes home to the sad room she's been renting since her breakup. She's known Simon, an activist and devout Catholic several years her senior, her whole life, and been in love with him for much of it. Their actions often observed at a neutral distance, these four fully human and flawed characters navigate contemporary life, with its dating apps and worsening inequalities and horrifying quantities of plastic, in a novel that yet feels refreshingly old-fashioned. Interspersed among chapters are emails between Alice and Eileen, not uncritical but steeped in affection, in which they discuss philosophy, politics, the degradation and collapse of societies, and how one can still be concerned about beauty, sex, and friendship, let alone something as inconsequential as a novel, in light of all that. Writing with her trademark truthfulness and wit, Rooney compels with both these meta-conversations and the actions of her characters' lives: their enthralling, intimate, and consequential grappling with themselves, with one another, with desire, and with the world.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Rooney's first novel since Normal People (2019), which became a popular and award-winning Hulu series, is steadily drawing excitement. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Conversations with Friends and Normal People. She also contributed to the writing and production of the Hulu/BBC television adaptation of Normal People.