Sally Rooney may be better known for second novel Normal People, at least partly due to its adaptation for TV, but her remarkably assured 2017 debut Conversations With Friends is an exploration of similar themes: the complexities of modern relationships, the thinness of the line between love and hate, the fallout from being lost in a fog of lust.
When students, best friends and former couple Frances and Bobbi come into the orbit of journalist Melissa and her actor husband Nick, their relationships become inextricably entangled. Blinded by mutual attraction, Frances and Nick embark on an affair, regardless of the collateral damage that seems inevitable. Rooney tracks its ebbs and flows - the flashes of passion, the misunderstandings, the romantic politics, the emotional turmoil - particularly through crisp, sparkling dialogue.
Through the figure of Frances - sharp-witted but hampered by confusion, self-doubt and self-loathing; a teeming mass of personal and social anxieties that she tries to mask with irony; struck down by ennui and a yearning for stimulation that leads her into dangerous territory - Rooney has much to say about the realities of being a smart if not very worldly twentysomething woman in the twenty-first century.
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