What to Read While Waiting for Sally Rooney's New Book

Sally Rooney “truly loved” this story about a 17-year-old girl in New York who lands a job transcribing a strange novel for Andy Warhol. What follows is a coming-of-age journey amid the upheaval of the 1960s that The New Yorker praised for being “a great book about Warhol with almost no Andy Warhol in it.”

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, the latest from the author of Skippy Dies examines the four members of a well-to-do Irish family whose lives seem to be cracking under pressures both external and internal. The Washington Post hailed this 600+ page tour de force that "reads like an instant classic” and chose it as one of its Ten Best Books of 2023. “Murray is a fantastically witty and empathetic writer, and he dazzles by somehow bringing the great sprawling randomness of life to glamorously choreographed climaxes.”

The Guardian detected an “echo of the anxiety driving Beautiful World, Where Are You” in the latest by the Irish author of Exciting Times, where we meet “a serial shagger who craves approval but doesn’t know what to do with it,” engaged to Celine, a concert pianist who’s “independent-minded and dedicated to her art yet somehow unable to contemplate life alone.”

In a musical odyssey that the San Francisco Chronicle praised as an “agile, propulsive coming-of-age novel ,” two brown girls from humble origins meet at a community dance class in London and forge a deep yet complicated bond before their lives take them in very different directions. “Smith's humor is both sharp and sly as she skewers various targets, including humorless, petty social activists and celebrity culture's inflated sense of importance."

This poetic debut novel from a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 recipient follows two young Black artists falling in love after meeting at a London pub, with “chapters [that] read like images, or movie stills, packed with meaning and shade, lighting and angles directing our attention to the subtle and important places.”

The anticipated first adult novel from a bestselling Irish YA author is a bittersweet ode to youth, friendship and romance set in Cork, Ireland. When Rachel and her roommate James set their sights on the same closeted professor, their love lives become a tangled mess. Vogue was smitten with this “sneakily philosophical book about growing up that offers its insights with charming, effervescent ease.”

Evicted from her south London flat and couchsurfing with friends, a queer Black poet named Elsie yearns for love while struggling to make ends meet. Acclaimed author Bernardine Evaristo told Vogue that "Little has created a lively, believable and likable female protagonist whose relatability lies both in her strength and vulnerability. I imagine many young people have been waiting for just this novel to speak to them and about them. It is a generational first."

Assuming that you already devoured Beautiful World, Where Are You, allow us to introduce you to the protagonist of this critically-acclaimed novel: a 20-something Brooklynite who finds herself hopelessly entangled in a relationship with a man in an open marriage. The Oprah Magazine was smitten with its “irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that's blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy."

Like the smash hit Normal People, this New Yorker staff writer’s “vibrant novel of ideas” also tells the story of a university student seeking to carve out her place in the world. In a rave review, the San Francisco Chronicle found a “succession of droll misadventures built around chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed observations” and “a poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for olives."