When Rooney came to speak at the Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic, interest was so high that the bookstore moved the event to a nearby church to accommodate the crowds. Articles emerged calling Rooney “ the first great millennial novelist,” mostly written by the kind of people who took a great deal of pleasure in immediately following up that phrase with a parenthetical about how it is a meaningless collection of words. In the US, Normal People became an Instagram status symbol endorsed by celebrities like Lena Dunham and Taylor Swift and Emily Ratajkowski. (It celebrates high literary merit, but also books that are fun to read.) Normal People was also longlisted for the Man Booker and for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. When it came out in the UK in 2018, Normal People won the UK’s Costa Book Award, the populist alternative to the Man Booker Prize. They mean that her books are now bona fide literary events. Those aren’t blockbuster numbers ( Michelle Obama’s Becoming, which sold 3.5 million copies in 2018, is a blockbuster), but for literary fiction, a genre in which 25,000 units sold can count as “sensational,” Rooney’s sales are more than a sensation. Conversations With Friends has sold just under 78,000 in hardcover and paperback since 2017. For a while there, Normal People was the only book that people who talk about books seemed willing to talk about.Īccording to the industry tracker NPD Bookscan, Normal People has sold just under 64,000 units in hardcover in the US in the four months it’s been out, not including e-books.

Normal People sucked all the air out of the room when it came out in the US in April, building on the success of Rooney’s much-buzzed-about 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends. “I can’t put it down,” said the woman next to me. As is usually the case at such events, everyone was talking about one particular book, the hot book of the moment, the one no one could stop thinking about - but for once, at this lunch full of people who have devoted their careers to making books for children, the title everyone was talking about wasn’t a children’s book. Earlier this summer, I attended a lunch for people who work with children’s books.

Book conversations with friends