Do you love Irish writers? Join the IrishCentral Book Club each month as we introduce some of the best new Irish books and authors.
Welcome to June’s pick for the IrishCentral Monthly Book Club! Each month we will pick a new Irish book or a great book from an Irish author and celebrate the amazing ability of the Irish to tell a good story.
Throughout June, we’ll be reading “Conversations with Friends” by Sally Rooney, the stunning debut novel from the 27-year-old Co. Mayo-native, which was chosen as one of Vogue’s “10 Best Books of 2017.” You can find out more about the book below or pick up your copy here.
With a new book announcement on the first day of each month, stay with us throughout the month as we talk to the authors and give you a chance to discuss some great Irish works. The best way to stay in touch with us and other book club members is to join our dedicated Facebook group here, where you can leave your comments and questions or give us some great Irish recommendations.
If you have any further comments, questions for the author or recommendations for a future IrishCentral Book of the Month, you can email us at books@irishcentral.com.
IrishCentral’s June Book of the Month: Conversations with Friends: A Novel
Author: Sally Rooney
Publisher: Hogarth
Genre: Literary Fiction, Women’s Fiction
Synopsis: A sharply intelligent novel about friendship, lust, jealousy, and the unexpected complications of adulthood in the 21st century
Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, Frances and Bobbi catch the eye of Melissa, a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into Melissa’s world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick. However amusing and ironic Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy, and Frances’s friendship with Bobbi begins to fracture. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally, terribly, with Bobbi.
Desperate to reconcile her inner life to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’s intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment. Written with gem-like precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.
About the author: Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta,The White Review, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Kevin Barry’s Stonecutter and The Winter Page anthology. Rooney’s debut novel, “Conversations with Friends,” was a Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard Book of the Year. The novel has been longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize, and shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award, the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year 2017, and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Rooney was the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. She is the editor of the Irish journal “The Stinging Fly.”
You can purchase "Conversations with Friends" here.
Be sure to join the IrishCentral Book Club group here or to send us an email with questions at books@irishcentral.com.
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