The recap
In a small town in the west of Ireland, Connell is the popular, quietly clever footballer and Marianne is the prickly loner everyone at school keeps at arm's length. Connell's mother cleans the big house where Marianne lives, and an after-school errand becomes the start of something neither of them is ready to admit to in public. What begins as a secret between two teenagers follows them to university in Dublin, where the social pecking order flips and their bond keeps reasserting itself in new and complicated forms. Rooney tracks the pair across several years in spare, precise prose, moving between their points of view and jumping ahead to the moments that change things. Class, shame, loneliness and the difficulty of saying what you actually mean all hum beneath the surface. The result is an intensely intimate portrait of two people who understand each other almost too well, and who keep getting in their own way.
Why read it
For anyone who remembers how all-consuming first love felt, and for readers who like their romance quiet, sharp-eyed and painfully honest.
Fun facts
- 01
Connell and Marianne first appeared in At the Clinic, a 2016 short story Rooney published in The White Review that finds them in their early twenties; she then went back to tell their story from the start.
- 02
The novel was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and named Waterstones Book of the Year.
- 03
It won the Costa Novel Award, making Rooney, then 27, the youngest writer ever to take that prize.
- 04
The 2020 BBC Three and Hulu series, adapted by Rooney with Alice Birch and Mark O'Rowe, earned four Emmy nominations, including one for Paul Mescal in his first screen role.
