Paradoxically, despite her wealth and fortune, Marianne’s upbringing seems to have more suffering than Connell’s, with suggestions of abuse at the hands of the male figures in her life and a strange maternal dislike.

Much like Marianne in her school-days, different because of her moneyed family, Connell struggles at university for the same reasons: he is different because he is poor and has a single parent background, in contrast to his privileged peers. Rooney’s examination of the term “normal” takes on significance here. Connell is perceptive enough to see through the semblances of sophistication in his fellow students, but while his wit is still sharp, his social standing has fallen dramatically, while Marianne’s seems to have been elevated.

The depictions of university are likewise evocative and amusingly familiar. That says more about him, the supposedly ordinary and healthy person, than it does about her.’ The extent of Marianne’s self-worth is frightening: ‘In a way she feels sorry for him now, because he has to live with the fact that he had sex with her, of his own free choice, and he liked it. Rooney explores these complexities in astonishingly vivid detail and extraordinary articulation. At school, Connell is universally liked, he is the centre-forward of the school football team, and, though quiet and reserved, he holds a respect and status at complete odds with his counterpart Marianne, who is comparatively reclusive and even reviled: “a lot of people really hate her.” Despite their social polarity, the pair are engaged in a secret sexual relationship, which must remain confidential for Connell to retain his perceived popular social status. Marianne and Connell desperately want to be regarded as “normal people”. Yet simultaneously, on a personal and emotional level, we find ourselves rooting for them to make it last. Low self-esteem and a propensity for self-destruction ties them together, and these afflictions cause us to question the sustainability of the relationship. Connell and Marianne are gifted young academics with bright futures, but with personal complications. “Conversations With Friends” hovers between multiple perspectives, whereas this novel spotlights two protagonists and their turbulent relationship from the end of school throughout university and beyond. Her latest novel, like her first, focuses on the lives of students in contemporary Dublin, an Ireland in which Catholicism no longer has lost supreme jurisdiction. While her acclaimed debut “Conversations With Friends” showed an experimental young writer with exciting promise, “Normal People”, written little under a year afterwards, seems to have pushed the bar higher for her future work, awaited with relish and anticipation. Sally Rooney’s long-awaited second novel “Normal People” burst onto the scene last month, and has been making waves in the literary world since its publication.

Normal People by Sally Rooney