Conversations with Friends - Tapa dura

A novelist to watch: an addictive debut, with nods to Tender is the Night, heralds a bright new talent.

[An] addictive, salted-caramel combination of seriously tough humour and frank vulnerability.

This is a novel to set beside Lena Dunham's television series Girls, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sitcom Fleabag, Noah Baumbach's film Frances Ha, Marielle Heller's morally intricate film The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Katherine Heiny's superlative short-story collection Single, Carefree, Mellow. With all that on the menu, what a great time it is to be watching and reading. I can't wait to see what Rooney serves up next.

(Sunday Times)

'Rooney writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literary novelists employ. This isn't to say that the novel lacks beauty. Its richness blooms quietly... Rooney's natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence... The high heat of [Frances and Bobbi's] friendship will remind many readers of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels.' (Alexandra Schwartz New Yorker)

Stunning.a 21st-century Bonjour Tristesse, transferred to Dublin. The writing by Rooney is witty and assured, and she has a terrific eye for the small put-downs that people hide behind "ordinary" conversations. Frances is a truly likeable narrator - naive but not stupid, and as baffled by the politics of sexual behaviour as most of us are at 21. This novel reboots the well-worn "getting of wisdom" format for a new age. (The Times)

'This formidably assured debut offers a dry-humoured portrait of the power play in romantic relationships, the artifice employed in everyday interaction and the ultimate unknowability of those we love. With her pithy dialogue and agonisingly astute social observations, Rooney, 26, proves herself a dazzling new talent.' (Mail on Sunday)

So good I felt something akin to grief the moment I finished it... A startlingly adept writer, seemingly incapable of crafting a paragraph that doesn't glimmer with humour, compassion, insight and truth. Frances is very different to Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, but Rooney shares with Plath a knack for particularising a feminine consciousness, and this novel is the best I've read on what it means to be young and female right now. (Daily Mail)

'A novel of ideas that is driven by character; a very compelling combination. Remarkable.' (Daily Telegraph - FIVE STARS * * * * *)

Hugely enjoyable romantic comedy... A very funny, very humanly messy tale of sexual and artistic self-discovery in which every page reveals shrewd emotional insight. Caught between laser-eyed irony and heart-melting sincerity, the book is a masterclass in narrative tone that left me desperate to read whatever Rooney writes next...

An addictive, funny and truthful first novel about love and literature.

(Metro, Five stars)

Fascinating, ferocious and shrewd. Sally Rooney has the sharpest eye for all of the most delicate cruelties of human interaction. (Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies)

Sally Rooney is a writer going all the way to the top. Conversations with Friends features the twenty-first century Irish descendents of Salinger's guileless wiseasses brought to life in prose as taut and coolly poised as early Bret Easton Ellis. (Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins)

If we called Irish writer Sally Rooney's debut the equivalent to discovering Zadie Smith then you'd probably roll your eyes. But keep an eye out this June for Rooney's Conversations With Friends... Sharp, funny and clever, it addresses big ideas (sex, love, relationships, feminism, work) while exploring the disintegrating friendship of joined-at-the-hip, Frances and Bobbi - this is a writer not just tackling her characters' lives but the topics that define life itself. (STYLIST)

'Sally Rooney writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literary novelists employ. This isn't to say that the novel lacks beauty. Its richness blooms quietly.' New Yorker Frances, Bobbi, Nick and Melissa ask each other endless questions. As their relationships unfold, in person and online, they discuss sex and friendship, art and literature, politics and gender, and, of course, one another. Twenty-one-year-old Frances is at the heart of it all, bringing us this tale of a complex menage-a-quatre and her affair with Nick, an older married man. You can read Conversations with Friends as a romantic comedy, or you can read it as a feminist text. You can read it as a book about infidelity, about the pleasures and difficulties of intimacy, or about how our minds think about our bodies. However you choose to read it, it is an unforgettable novel about the possibility of love. 'Rooney shares with Plath a knack for particularising a feminine consciousness, and this novel is the best I've read on what it means to be young and female right now.' Daily Mail 'The kind of novel that young women transitioning into adulthood in the early 21st century may one day call "seminal".' Evening Standard 'A novel of ideas that is driven by character; a very compelling combination.' Daily Telegraph, FIVE STARS * * * * * 'Hugely enjoyable romantic comedy' Metro, FIVE STARS * * * * * 'Truly beguiles... Heralds a fresh new voice in fiction' Stylist, FIVE STARS * * * * *