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Conversations with Friends Hardcover – 11 July 2017
by
Sally Rooney
(Author)
Sally Rooney
(Author)
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Product details
- Publisher : Hogarth Press (11 July 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0451499050
- ISBN-13 : 978-0451499059
- Dimensions : 14.73 x 2.54 x 21.84 cm
-
Best Sellers Rank:
164,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 501 in Women's Fiction About Friendship
- 5,932 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- 18,074 in Contemporary Women's Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
Product description
Review
"Smart and perceptive."--Minneapolis Star-Tribune "The self-deceptions of a new generation are at the core of Sally Rooney's debut, Conversations with Friends, which captures something wonderfully odd-cornered and real in the story of an Irish millennial."--Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"A bracing, miraculous debut."--The Millions
"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 "Rooney's exploration of growing out of naïveté is true to life, sometimes painfully so, and anyone who has thrived on created drama, who has imagined higher stakes than exist, will see a bit of themselves."--BuzzFeed
"An insightful look at what it's like to be young, smart, and deeply confused about friendship and love . . . It's like an Ask Polly letter in the form of a novel, in the best possible way."--The Cut
"Rooney expertly captures what it's like to be young today: the conversations flow seamlessly from email to text message to unspoken glance, the sexual and creative confidence, the admiration for older men who write emails written in all lowercase. Her first person narrator, the twenty-one-year-old Frances, is a constant, careful observer, and yet Rooney leaves room for the reader to see all the things Frances herself does not."--The Paris Review
"In this searing, insightful debut, Rooney offers an unapologetic perspective on the vagaries of relationships . . . a treatise on married life, the impact of infidelity, the ramifications of one's actions, and how the person one chooses to be with can impact one's individuality. Throughout, Rooney's descriptive eye lends beauty and veracity to this complex and vivid story."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Readers who enjoyed Belinda McKeon's Tender and Caitriona Lally's Eggshells will enjoy this exceptional debut."--Library Journal (starred review) "A smart, sexy, realistic portrayal of a woman finding herself."--Booklist (starred review)
"[Sally] Rooney has managed to take something old, the romance novel, and make it new: Frances is a bisexual communist student, allergic to expressing emotion, and her love affair is with a married man, and yet the book makes no attempt to make a moral stand on fidelity or punish its characters for their passions. The effect is, frankly, riveting, and creates a peculiar sensation of danger. An addictive read."--Rufi Thorpe, author of The Girls from Corona del Mar and Dear Fang, with Love "Sally Rooney's writing is cool, wry, and smooth and gives the reader a sense of being in the lucky position of overhearing not only what fascinating strangers are talking about, but also what they're thinking. I was riveted 'til the last page."--Emily Gould, author of Friendship
"A bracing, miraculous debut."--The Millions
"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 "Rooney's exploration of growing out of naïveté is true to life, sometimes painfully so, and anyone who has thrived on created drama, who has imagined higher stakes than exist, will see a bit of themselves."--BuzzFeed
"An insightful look at what it's like to be young, smart, and deeply confused about friendship and love . . . It's like an Ask Polly letter in the form of a novel, in the best possible way."--The Cut
"Rooney expertly captures what it's like to be young today: the conversations flow seamlessly from email to text message to unspoken glance, the sexual and creative confidence, the admiration for older men who write emails written in all lowercase. Her first person narrator, the twenty-one-year-old Frances, is a constant, careful observer, and yet Rooney leaves room for the reader to see all the things Frances herself does not."--The Paris Review
"In this searing, insightful debut, Rooney offers an unapologetic perspective on the vagaries of relationships . . . a treatise on married life, the impact of infidelity, the ramifications of one's actions, and how the person one chooses to be with can impact one's individuality. Throughout, Rooney's descriptive eye lends beauty and veracity to this complex and vivid story."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Readers who enjoyed Belinda McKeon's Tender and Caitriona Lally's Eggshells will enjoy this exceptional debut."--Library Journal (starred review) "A smart, sexy, realistic portrayal of a woman finding herself."--Booklist (starred review)
"[Sally] Rooney has managed to take something old, the romance novel, and make it new: Frances is a bisexual communist student, allergic to expressing emotion, and her love affair is with a married man, and yet the book makes no attempt to make a moral stand on fidelity or punish its characters for their passions. The effect is, frankly, riveting, and creates a peculiar sensation of danger. An addictive read."--Rufi Thorpe, author of The Girls from Corona del Mar and Dear Fang, with Love "Sally Rooney's writing is cool, wry, and smooth and gives the reader a sense of being in the lucky position of overhearing not only what fascinating strangers are talking about, but also what they're thinking. I was riveted 'til the last page."--Emily Gould, author of Friendship
About the Author
Sally Rooney was born in the west of Ireland in 1991. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and The London Review of Books. Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, she is the author of Conversations with Friends. In 2019, she was named to the inaugural Time 100 Next list.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
7,147 global ratings
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Top reviews from Australia
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Reviewed in Australia on 5 September 2019
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I loved reading Normal People by Sally Rooney and I also loved reading this mesmerising interior exploration of love between 4 main characters. She inhabits her characters in such a way that their eccentric behaviours and thoughts are totally convincing. I also appreciate her awareness of class and power and how these factors affect relationships. Highly recommended!
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Reviewed in Australia on 2 January 2018
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What a great book this is. I read some chapters and listened to others on Audible. I had trouble putting it down (or removing the AirPods). The book is so well written that I really felt I was in Frances’ head a lot of the time and felt her feelings as she struggled her way through the complexities of her relationships. Highly recommended. I’ve never given a book 5 stars, I’m reserving that for the last book I ever read (and re-read in perpetuity). This one was close! My best read of 2017, albeit concluded on 1 January 2018.
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Reviewed in Australia on 13 January 2019
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This was a well written character study. However, I found the narrator frustrating as she was portrayed as a strong minded independent person, but ultimately turned out to be quite weak and pathetic. Frustrating end to the story.
2 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in Australia on 20 April 2019
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I would not have continued reading this book but it was on my book group list. Nothing of substance to get your teeth into. The author has never heard of quotation marks which was a little confusing at times. Mainly about lesbianism.
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Reviewed in Australia on 9 June 2020
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Mostly a good read. I did like the strong focus on friendship and realising what you have when you lose it. However, the protagonist was confusing at times and became very unlike able and hard to relate to. I felt her actions didn’t make sense and I was quite frustrated towards the end.
Reviewed in Australia on 28 May 2019
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I just didn't click with any of the characters in the book, which made it a little tedious to read.
Reviewed in Australia on 1 March 2020
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Excellent use of diction and description.
Loved the story. Entanglement of irresistible relationships.
Dublin as a setting is like an extra character.
Loved the story. Entanglement of irresistible relationships.
Dublin as a setting is like an extra character.
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Reviewed in Australia on 24 July 2020
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Got it for book club....repetitively boring. Characters shallow and predictable. I can’t recommend this book. I only continued reading it as I had too.
Top reviews from other countries

Adam K.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Surely Some Mistake?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 April 2019Verified Purchase
This book comes festooned with awards and laudatory reviews, blurbs and hype and Rooney herself is acclaimed as the Next Big Thing, one of the great authors of the 21st Century.
The mind boggles, the currency cheapens, and all faith in pundits and the judgement of Zadie Smith goes right down the pan.
This is a truly, truly, dreadful book, almost fascinatingly so. Frances, supposedly "cool headed and observant", falls in love with an older, married man. It goes badly. Surprised? She apparently is. "I can't remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily" is a line from about halfway through. Apart from the cringe-worthy triteness, it also reveals the lead character to be stunningly obtuse, and far from the "observant" person the blurb on the cover would have us believe. All the characters - Frances, her best friend/lover Bobbi, the journalist Melissa and the husband/lover Nick - are so flatly written they might as well be cardboard cut-outs, their dialogue equally flat and lifeless and dull, to the point that it became impossible to work out who's talking. It could be anybody, about anybody, about anything.
And then there's the prose itself -- it's....it's hideous, it really is. About halfway through I started making notes in the margins, underlining the worst passages -- something an editor is supposed to do. In no particular order: "His heart continued to beat like an excited or miserable clock" It...it what?? "Valerie spoke with a moneyed British accent, too rich to be comical". How does THAT work? "I perceived that my face and hair were becoming wet, too wet to feel normal"; "She looked clean and dry like a model from a catalogue. My hair was leaking water into my face". Leaking? "I laughed to myself, although there was no one there to see me". That's kind of what it means, right? "He never touched me like that usually. But he was looking at me, so I guess he must have known who I was". Wait, this woman's supposed to be "observant", right? And my favourite: "He touched me cautiously like a deer touches things with its face". Oh god, make it stop.
Seriously, this is supposed to be award-worthy? A tired story, hitched to some staggeringly dreadful prose which reveals nothing of the workings of the human heart, nothing of the soul, nothing of passion. Shame on the critics who have passed this off as something worthy, shame on every one of the publications whose glowing quotes litter the front pages of this travesty. I'm tempted to read Rooney's "Normal People" to see if it's as hysterically bad or if, by some miracle, she improved. If I come across a copy for less than a pound, I might just, but I'm not paying much more for this kind of nonsense.
The mind boggles, the currency cheapens, and all faith in pundits and the judgement of Zadie Smith goes right down the pan.
This is a truly, truly, dreadful book, almost fascinatingly so. Frances, supposedly "cool headed and observant", falls in love with an older, married man. It goes badly. Surprised? She apparently is. "I can't remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily" is a line from about halfway through. Apart from the cringe-worthy triteness, it also reveals the lead character to be stunningly obtuse, and far from the "observant" person the blurb on the cover would have us believe. All the characters - Frances, her best friend/lover Bobbi, the journalist Melissa and the husband/lover Nick - are so flatly written they might as well be cardboard cut-outs, their dialogue equally flat and lifeless and dull, to the point that it became impossible to work out who's talking. It could be anybody, about anybody, about anything.
And then there's the prose itself -- it's....it's hideous, it really is. About halfway through I started making notes in the margins, underlining the worst passages -- something an editor is supposed to do. In no particular order: "His heart continued to beat like an excited or miserable clock" It...it what?? "Valerie spoke with a moneyed British accent, too rich to be comical". How does THAT work? "I perceived that my face and hair were becoming wet, too wet to feel normal"; "She looked clean and dry like a model from a catalogue. My hair was leaking water into my face". Leaking? "I laughed to myself, although there was no one there to see me". That's kind of what it means, right? "He never touched me like that usually. But he was looking at me, so I guess he must have known who I was". Wait, this woman's supposed to be "observant", right? And my favourite: "He touched me cautiously like a deer touches things with its face". Oh god, make it stop.
Seriously, this is supposed to be award-worthy? A tired story, hitched to some staggeringly dreadful prose which reveals nothing of the workings of the human heart, nothing of the soul, nothing of passion. Shame on the critics who have passed this off as something worthy, shame on every one of the publications whose glowing quotes litter the front pages of this travesty. I'm tempted to read Rooney's "Normal People" to see if it's as hysterically bad or if, by some miracle, she improved. If I come across a copy for less than a pound, I might just, but I'm not paying much more for this kind of nonsense.
272 people found this helpful
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Molly
1.0 out of 5 stars
The reviews on the cover are wrong
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 October 2018Verified Purchase
This book is in the running for the worst book I have read so far this year. I kept on reading in the hope that something would happen or that one of the characters would endear themselves to be but I shouldn't have bothered. This book is banal and the characters are irritating and impossible to bond with on any level. The writing is clumpy and oddly bland, there is no descriptions of Ireland or France that invoke any connections with those places. This is one of those books that I wonder how on earth she got a publishing deal when there are so many better authors self publishing amazing works because they can't get published and this drivel can. I just don't get it.
213 people found this helpful
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S. Gleeson
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible characters and storyline
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 January 2019Verified Purchase
I don't even know where to start with this review. This book was so bad it actually makes me feel angry that I finished it and wasted my time. I kept wanting to give it another chance but the while thing just frustrated me.
The characters in this book aren't just badly written, I hated them all and they learned nothing from their experiences, they just repeated their loathing behaviour and terrible life decisions over and over again. The main character is so full of self loathing and yet completely self centred and so over privileged but treats herself like the endless victim of every situation.
I have no doubt that sally rooney can write, but these characters make me want to punch a wall.
The story goes nowhere and seems like it begins when it ends. I also didn't enjoy the conversation style without quote marks, it just made it unnecessarily difficult to distinguish between what characters were saying and what they were thinking.
Sorry I wasted my time reading it and I have no clue why it's so highly critically acclaimed.
The characters in this book aren't just badly written, I hated them all and they learned nothing from their experiences, they just repeated their loathing behaviour and terrible life decisions over and over again. The main character is so full of self loathing and yet completely self centred and so over privileged but treats herself like the endless victim of every situation.
I have no doubt that sally rooney can write, but these characters make me want to punch a wall.
The story goes nowhere and seems like it begins when it ends. I also didn't enjoy the conversation style without quote marks, it just made it unnecessarily difficult to distinguish between what characters were saying and what they were thinking.
Sorry I wasted my time reading it and I have no clue why it's so highly critically acclaimed.
149 people found this helpful
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P. G. Harris
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deeply human and humane
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 September 2018Verified Purchase
In my student days, I knew more than one Frances, cooler than everyone else, more intelligent, and slightly (or often very) intimidating. Then, years later you find out they were actually more messed up than everyone else.
Conversations with Friends is the story of four people and the shifting relationships between them. Frances and Bobbi are students in Dublin. Ex-lovers, they remain close friends and work the literary circuit as performance poets. Frances is introverted, a talented writer, while Bobbi is an extrovert, the more gifted performer. Melissa is a photographer who wants to profile the two young women. She invites them to a party at her home, where they meet her husband, Nick, completing the central quartet. Bobbi fancies Melissa, Frances is drawn to Nick.
As the story progresses, it shifts between Dublin and a holiday in France. Through the novel, each goes through ups and downs and the relationships between them are equally volatile. We also learn about their troubled pasts and present, especially Nick and Frances.
In a word, I thought it was terrific, absolutely terrific. I've read a number of more critical reviews and while I can appreciate a number (but not all) of the negative comments, I still think the book is terrific.
Is this a book in which none of the characters is pleasant? I would have to disagree with that. Frances is outwardly cold, snarky and aloof. But she is also insecure, damaged and sensitive. She might be difficult , but she isn't unlovable. There is one devastating scene near the end of the book where she is confronted by the difference between her own self image and the impression another character has of her.
It is true that this isn't a plot heavy book, but that isn't the point. This is primarily a book about relationships, and those relationships are superbly drawn. As the portrayal of friendship between two young women, that between Frances and Bobbi feels completely genuine and realistic. The sparks which fly between Nick and Frances generated by something between love and hate are thrilling.
The writing style is flat, functional, almost child like at times. Again, as the voice of this disengaged, alienated young woman that came across as completely authentic.
So, it a nutshell, this is a stunningly humane work about damaged, ambiguous, very human people.
Conversations with Friends is the story of four people and the shifting relationships between them. Frances and Bobbi are students in Dublin. Ex-lovers, they remain close friends and work the literary circuit as performance poets. Frances is introverted, a talented writer, while Bobbi is an extrovert, the more gifted performer. Melissa is a photographer who wants to profile the two young women. She invites them to a party at her home, where they meet her husband, Nick, completing the central quartet. Bobbi fancies Melissa, Frances is drawn to Nick.
As the story progresses, it shifts between Dublin and a holiday in France. Through the novel, each goes through ups and downs and the relationships between them are equally volatile. We also learn about their troubled pasts and present, especially Nick and Frances.
In a word, I thought it was terrific, absolutely terrific. I've read a number of more critical reviews and while I can appreciate a number (but not all) of the negative comments, I still think the book is terrific.
Is this a book in which none of the characters is pleasant? I would have to disagree with that. Frances is outwardly cold, snarky and aloof. But she is also insecure, damaged and sensitive. She might be difficult , but she isn't unlovable. There is one devastating scene near the end of the book where she is confronted by the difference between her own self image and the impression another character has of her.
It is true that this isn't a plot heavy book, but that isn't the point. This is primarily a book about relationships, and those relationships are superbly drawn. As the portrayal of friendship between two young women, that between Frances and Bobbi feels completely genuine and realistic. The sparks which fly between Nick and Frances generated by something between love and hate are thrilling.
The writing style is flat, functional, almost child like at times. Again, as the voice of this disengaged, alienated young woman that came across as completely authentic.
So, it a nutshell, this is a stunningly humane work about damaged, ambiguous, very human people.
120 people found this helpful
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C Heath
2.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful writing, pedestrian story-telling
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 September 2018Verified Purchase
There were moments in this book I just wanted it to take off. You spend a lot of time (most of the book) thinking come on get good, get good and the only reason you really stick with it is because of her abilities as a a writer. You can tell Sally Rooney's a fabulous writer, there is some gorgeous prose but it's so difficult to stick with because you just never ever warm to the characters and it just meanders aimlessly at times. I literally threw the book on the bed in frustration having finished the final paragraph. I do think she'll write a wonderful book one day but unfortunately it's not this one.
68 people found this helpful
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