LATEST TITLES

NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney, Faber & Faber, £14.99 (ebook £6.99)

★★★★★

SALLY Rooney had a lot to live up to after her

2017 debut novel, Conversations With

Friends, was a runaway success earning the illustrious Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year prize.

Fans can relax: Normal People is a triumph. The story centres on the high school friendship of Marianne and Connell. It’s a roller coaster that will break your heart, but also fill it with joy and hope.

The lead characters come from the same small Irish town, but have very different backgrounds. Together, they move to study at Trinity College, learning to navigate each other, society and Dublin with varying degrees of success. It sounds overblown, but we are so lucky that Sally Rooney is writing – her style spare, her approach to dialogue quite exquisite.

WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews, Faber & Faber, £12.99 (ebook £6.47)

★★★★★

THIS short novel imagines a series of conversations among the women of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia as they decide whether to quit or stick with a community that expects them to forgive men who sexually assaulted them.

It’s based on the experiences of women of the remote Manitoba Colony, who during the 2000s, were knocked out with animal anaesthetic and raped by several men in their community. Toews takes these real events and weaves a response, in the form of the minutes of a meeting, as eight of the women meet and try to navigate a way through the constraints of their lives and the suffering forced upon them and their children.

The women are conflicted and contradictory, and vividly wrought – you become simultaneously attached, furious and frustrated with them all, wanting to pitch in with your own outrage and opinions on what they should do before the men get back from the city. A searing, brutal and astounding read that will hit you devastatingly hard.