12 books like Normal People
What people miss after Normal People is usually the specific thing: two people who can't say the thing that matters, class sitting quietly in the room, and prose that refuses to make a fuss. These picks come at that from different angles — Irish contemporaries, campus infatuations, and novels that stay close to one woman's self-destruction.
Updated September 2026
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Irish twenties, class and the thing left unsaid
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan 2020
Dolan writes the same dry, clause-by-clause attention to who has money and who is pretending not to notice; the comedy here is colder and more deliberate, and the love triangle is worked out in Hong Kong rather than Dublin.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue 2023
Same Irish student milieu of bad jobs, older men and friendships that shade into something else, but it's warmer and funnier, narrated in hindsight by someone who has survived it.
Snowflake by Louise Nealon 2021
A girl commutes from a Kildare dairy farm to Trinity and finds the two halves of her life won't speak to each other — the class gap of Normal People made literal, with a strand of mental illness and family that Rooney keeps offstage.
The Gathering by Anne Enright 2007
Enright shares the forensic Irish interest in what families do to each other and never name; this is a grown woman looking back in grief and fury, so the register is harsher and the sex sadder.
Campus infatuation and clever people misreading each other
The Idiot by Elif Batuman 2017
A first year spent in thrall to an email correspondence with a boy who explains nothing, with the same agonising gap between what's felt and what's typed; Batuman plays it for deadpan comedy rather than heartbreak.
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides 2011
Undergraduate love theorised to death by people who've read too much theory, with one partner's mental illness pulling everything out of shape — a fuller, more conventionally plotted novel with three points of view.
Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress 2022
Art-school rivalry, sex and money curdling into each other, with the same seriousness about how talent and class interact; it's more of an ensemble piece and has a plot that leaves campus behind.
Close-up on a woman coming apart in a relationship
Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan 2021
For anyone who read Marianne's self-abasement as the truest thing in the book, Nolan takes it much further and much closer to the bone — one voice, no relief, very little tenderness.
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams 2019
A young woman's breakup spirals into damaging choices she can see herself making, as Marianne does; the setting is south London and the tone swings between very funny and very bleak.
Writers and Lovers by Lily King 2020
Grief, debt and an unfinished novel keep tripping up a woman's attempts at love, with the same low-key precision about money worries; the ending is considerably kinder than Rooney's.
First love across years and distance
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2013
Two teenagers separated and reunited over a decade and a half, with everything unspoken between them intact — a much broader book, alive to race, migration and the politics Rooney only glances at.
Talking at Night by Claire Daverley 2023
Two people who keep finding each other and keep failing to stay, told without quotation marks in the same stripped style; it's more openly emotional and turns on a single early tragedy.
If you also liked…
- Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
- A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
- Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan
- 1984 by George Orwell
Questions
- Which of these is closest to Normal People in style?
- Talking at Night is the nearest match on the page — same unpunctuated dialogue, same on-off structure over years. Exciting Times is closest in voice, if it's the cool irony you liked.
- Are any of these as explicit?
- Acts of Desperation is more explicit and much more uncomfortable about it. Queenie has plenty of frank sex too, while The Idiot and Americanah keep it largely offstage.
- I want something less bleak. Where should I start?
- The Rachel Incident and Writers & Lovers both handle grief and bad decisions but let their narrators come out the other side.