Literary Fiction Like Normal People by Sally Rooney

There's something addictive about the way Sally Rooney writes about relationships—that clinical precision with which she dissects every glance, every text message, every unspoken tension between two people trying to connect. If you've found yourself underlining passages in Normal People or rereading conversations between characters to parse their hidden meanings, you understand the particular hunger her work creates. It's not just about the spare prose or the millennial malaise; it's about that achingly specific way she captures how it feels to want someone and not quite know how to bridge the gap between desire and reality. This collection brings together novels that share Rooney's gift for turning the microscope on modern intimacy, each one offering its own exploration of how we fumble toward connection in an increasingly disconnected world.

You might start with Rooney's own debut, Conversations with Friends, which in many ways feels like the blueprint for this entire literary movement. Frances and Bobbi, former lovers turned best friends, become entangled with a married couple in Dublin, creating a quartet of desire and miscommunication that feels both deeply specific and universally recognizable. The novel shares Normal People's fascination with power dynamics and class consciousness, but here the lens widens to examine how groups navigate intimacy, not just couples.

Elif Batuman's The Idiot strikes similar notes but transplants the action to 1990s Harvard, where Selin navigates her freshman year with the same overthinking intensity that marks Rooney's protagonists. The novel captures that particular undergraduate experience of feeling simultaneously brilliant and completely clueless, especially when Selin falls for Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics student. Their relationship, conducted largely through email, presages our current digital intimacies while maintaining a timeless quality of yearning. The sequel, Either/Or, picks up with Selin in her sophomore year, still trying to decode the mysteries of desire and literature with Batuman's characteristic wit intact.

Where Rooney and Batuman focus on the educated elite, Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident brings a refreshing working-class perspective to similar themes. Set in Cork, Ireland, it follows Rachel and her best friend James as they navigate a complicated entanglement with Rachel's married professor and his wife. The novel captures the same messy intimacies and moral ambiguities that define this literary moment, but with a warmth and humor that feels distinctly its own.

For a male perspective on these dynamics, Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. offers a brutally honest portrait of a Brooklyn writer navigating the dating world with all the self-absorption and casual cruelty that implies. Waldman's genius lies in making Nate both completely insufferable and utterly recognizable—he's every guy who's ever ghosted you, but also human enough that you understand why.

Susan Choi's My Education predates the Rooney phenomenon but shares its DNA, following graduate student Regina as she falls into an affair with her professor—or rather, as she thinks she is, until she realizes it's actually his wife she desires. The novel captures the totalizing nature of first love with an intensity that will remind you why these books hit so hard.

Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation takes a different formal approach—told in fragments and vignettes—but explores similar territory: the gap between who we think we are and who we become in relationships. Following a marriage from courtship through crisis, it's like reading someone's most private thoughts about love, ambition, and compromise.

What unites these books isn't just their spare prose or their focus on relationships—it's their ability to articulate feelings we've all had but couldn't quite name. They're novels for anyone who's ever analyzed a text message for hidden meaning, wondered if they were too much or not enough, or felt the peculiar loneliness of being misunderstood by someone lying right next to them. Each offers its own version of what Rooney does so well: making the personal feel universal and the universal feel achingly personal. In reading them, you'll find not just great stories but a vocabulary for understanding your own attempts at connection in this strange, modern world.