Sally Rooney Books in Order

If you want the book most people start with: Normal People
If you want Rooney at her sharpest on friendship and desire: Conversations with Friends → Normal People
If you want thirty-something friendships, romance, and bigger questions: Beautiful World, Where Are You
If you want the newest, weightier family story: Intermezzo
If you already love the novels and want extras: Mr Salary → Normal People: The Scripts

Sally Rooney was born on February 20, 1991, in Castlebar, County Mayo, and grew up there in the west of Ireland. Her mother ran the Linenhall Arts Centre, her father worked for the state telecom company, and Rooney has said she was lucky to grow up around a real local writing community. That mix of small-town life, books, argument, and close observation shows up again and again in her fiction.

She started early.

As a teenager she joined a writing group and wrote an early novel she later described as terrible, which feels very in keeping with her dry honesty. At Trinity College Dublin she studied English, was elected a Scholar in 2011, and threw herself into competitive debating with the Hist. In 2013 she finished as the top speaker at the European Universities Debating Championships. That background helps explain why her dialogue feels so alert to status, language, and the tiny shifts of power inside a conversation.

After college, Rooney worked in restaurant administration and kept writing. In late 2014 she began writing with more focus, and Conversations with Friends came together quickly while she was doing postgraduate study in American literature. Published in 2017, the novel follows Frances and Bobbi as they fall into the orbit of an older married couple. Readers connected with how funny, awkward, and intimate it felt, and with the way it tracks money, class, and desire without making any of that seem abstract.

Then Normal People made her impossible to ignore.

The 2018 novel follows Connell and Marianne from school in the west of Ireland to Trinity College, and it became the book many people now start with. What readers tend to love is not big plot machinery but the emotional accuracy, the missed chances, the social pressure, the way tenderness and shame can sit side by side. Rooney later contributed to the writing and production of the television adaptation, and both Normal People and Conversations with Friends were adapted for the BBC.

Her later books kept widening the frame. Beautiful World, Where Are You looks at friendship, work, sex, faith, and art through four young adults trying to build decent lives while the wider world feels unstable. Intermezzo, published in 2024, turns to grief and family, following two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, after their father’s death. Even when the setup changes, Rooney keeps returning to some of the same questions: who gets to feel at ease in a room, who has money, who has power, what love asks of people, and how intimacy can be both ordinary and life-changing.

She has also written shorter work, including Mr Salary, and books tied to her screen work, including Normal People: The Scripts. Across novels, stories, and scripts, she is especially good on ordinary speech, private negotiations, and the emotional weight of everyday life. Her characters text, argue, flirt, read, work, and overthink. They are often smart enough to explain their feelings, and still very bad at living them.

Rooney has spent time in Dublin and New York, but she now lives and works back in County Mayo. That feels fitting. Her books travel widely, but they stay grounded in specific places, especially western Ireland and Dublin, and in the quiet, messy details of how people try to know one another.