The plot was old-naïve young woman falls in love with broken married man, heartbreak and suffering ensue-but the novel felt entirely new. They become entangled with a thirtysomething couple, Nick and Melissa Frances and Nick have an affair. Conversations With Friends was the story of two university students, Frances and Bobbi, who are ex-girlfriends and best friends.

With Rooney this is especially pronounced. Many good writers and all the great ones have only one story to tell, even if they find different ways of telling it. He would put it in an email to Marianne, but he can’t email her when she’s downstairs.” “He thinks about this phrase once or twice. “Cherries hang on the dark-green trees like earrings,” thinks Connell at one point. Her images are striking, and her wit subtle and dry the reader doesn’t share the jokes as much as she admires them. She brings an early-dawn feeling to the subject of human intimacy-usually portrayed as messy and chaotic-and an analytic philosopher’s interest in clearing away problems, in scrubbing things down to their parts, so that they can be built anew. They are plain as white walls, empty rooms with one beautiful accent, like a potted fern. The word that gets used to describe Rooney’s style is “spare.” Her paragraphs are built for the Instagram age. She has a keen eye for the desires and anxieties expressed in everyday behavior-how someone holds a coffee stirrer, or “presses his hands down slightly further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets all at once.” Her books are like strangely pleasurable medical exams, in which she opens her characters on the table and goes over their insides with a scalpel. But what makes her a great novelist is her freakish psychological acuity. She has a knack for dialogue, a faultless grasp of pacing, and the ability to situate the reader instantly in a place and a feeling. Rooney, who is Irish, has an uncanny sense of how people under 35 talk and text, how they use the internet, how they voice their passionate yet casual Marxism, how it feels to come of age after the 2008 crash. The 28-year-old Rooney has been hailed, not implausibly, as “the first great millennial author.” Her debut, Conversations With Friends, was as star-making as White Teeth and as zeitgeisty as Less Than Zero.

In every generation, there are writers who speak for that generation, who bottle some essential current or mode of thinking and being, and arrange it in letters on the page.

Sally rooney new book