Conversations with Friends - The Library of the Uncommons

Hardcover, 320 pages

English language

Published July 11, 2017 by Faber & Faber, Hogarth.

ISBN:: 978-0-571-33424-7

(5 reviews)

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to …

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, “Conversations With Friends” is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."

9 editions

4thace reviewed Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Review of 'Conversations with Friends' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This both has a first person narrator, Frances, who isn't exactly unreliable in what she tells us, but who has difficulty identifying her feelings, which makes her an unreliable friend overall. The key relationship is the one she has with her brilliant and well to to friend Bobbi who used to be her girlfriend but after an unresolved breakup is now her friend. It depicts their relationship with an older married couple whom they meet and develop feelings for, while perhaps never really getting to know well. The book's title is interesting in that you come to question each of the words making it up by the end. And all this, Frances also has an unexpected serious health crisis which helps you understand her emotions when you find out which of her friends she decides to disclose this fact to. It is a story of modern urban life, with texts …

This both has a first person narrator, Frances, who isn't exactly unreliable in what she tells us, but who has difficulty identifying her feelings, which makes her an unreliable friend overall. The key relationship is the one she has with her brilliant and well to to friend Bobbi who used to be her girlfriend but after an unresolved breakup is now her friend. It depicts their relationship with an older married couple whom they meet and develop feelings for, while perhaps never really getting to know well. The book's title is interesting in that you come to question each of the words making it up by the end. And all this, Frances also has an unexpected serious health crisis which helps you understand her emotions when you find out which of her friends she decides to disclose this fact to. It is a story of modern urban life, with texts and emails, unpaid internships and economic uncertainty with a traditional kind of coming of age theme. The time when Bobbi and Frances were a couple is not really told or shown but alluded to in reference to the events in the timeline, years later, and in the trauma it is associated with for Frances. The writing is carefully crafted and suggests nuances to the characters the narrator may not herself recognize.

The audiobook narration by Aoife McMahon is energetic and yet restrained as it portrays the voice of a closed-off character who does not have the knack of feeling her way through life. I would like to