Book Review: Conversations with Friends
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5 Out of 5 Stars
Conversations with Friends
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney is such an addicting book. We compare the experience of reading it to the way reality shows lure people into watching. That’s not to say this novel is true. Instead, as with her other works, we think Sally Rooney’s writing is so compelling because her stories often seem real. In other words, her work hooks us from the start because many of us have felt the way her characters do.
Such characters struggle with self-doubt, body issues, addiction, betrayal, family trouble, etc. It’s like she’s peeked into our brains and plucked out all the challenging bits, and put them into a story. For this, we can’t help but be transfixed.
We think you’ll have trouble putting it down. We certainly did!
“Sally Rooney’s debut novel is a remarkably charming exploration of that very uncharming subject: the human ego…Conversations With Friends sparkles with controlled rhetoric. But it ends up emphasizing the truths exploding in the silences.”
– Slate
Messy, To Be Sure
If you’ve read and enjoyed Normal People, you will love Conversations with Friends as well. The tone of both novels is very similar. Each is about young women discovering who she is and how she fits into the world and her relationships, and both are set in Ireland with a brief excursion here or there to other European countries.
The novel Normal People is mainly about a young woman and man and their relationship with each other throughout their school years.
Conversations with Friends is about a twenty-something young woman, her relationship with her gay ex-girlfriend (and current friend), an affair with an older married man, and a quasi-friendship with his wife. So it’s pretty messy, to be sure. But that’s why we loved it!
PS…as with Normal People, Conversations with Friends is heading to the small screen on Hulu. It will be out in 2022. As a result, be sure to read it before the series airs.
Conversations with Friends Synopsis:
Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a writing career 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. 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.
Author Bio:
Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People. She was the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. In 2018, Conversations with Friends was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, and Normal People was the Waterstones Book of the Year, won the Costa Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Rooney won the Encore Award for Normal People in 2019. She was the Stinging Fly editor in 2018 and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library from 2019–20. She was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the television adaptation of Normal People, which aired on CBC Gem in 2020.
Conversations with Friends FAQ
The print book is 313 pages.
Conversations with Friends was published on July 11, 2017.
Yes, there is a television series that will air on Hulu in 2022.
Yes, you can purchase the Audible book through Amazon here.
The cover image of this feature is by Kelsey Knight on Unsplash
To purchase Conversations with Friends on Amazon, click the button below.
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Do you enjoy contemporary fiction filled with messy character situations?
Click below to check out our recent review of Friends & Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan.
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