Frances is a twenty-one-year-old student and aspiring writer in Dublin, cool, observant, and guarded. She performs spoken-word poetry with her charismatic ex-girlfriend and closest friend, Bobbi, with whom she remains intensely, complicatedly bound. When the pair are taken up by Melissa, an older, established photographer and essayist, Frances is drawn into the orbit of Melissa's handsome, reserved actor husband, Nick.
What begins as banter curdles into an affair, and Frances, who prides herself on ironic detachment, finds her carefully managed self-image coming apart. As she navigates desire, jealousy, money, and a body that keeps failing her, she has to reckon with how little her theories about love and independence protect her from actually feeling. The novel unfolds in Frances's precise, deadpan first person, alive to every power shift in a conversation.
Sally Rooney's debut, Conversations with Friends, announced one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive voices. It is a sharp, unsettling study of friendship, infidelity, and self-invention among young people who talk brilliantly and understand themselves only partway.