'I have no idea if I'll write another book' - 'Normal People' author Sally Rooney

The 27-year-old Irish novelist Sally Rooney already has one bestseller, which started a publishing bidding auction in 2017, and its Booker-longlisted follow-up under her belt.  So why does she see herself as a failure, asks Benjamin Secher

Here's looking at you, kids: Sally Rooney's millennial character study in 'Normal People' is never anything less than surgically sharp. Photo: Tony Gavin

Benjamin Secher

"I have no idea if I’ll write another book,” says Sally Rooney, sitting in the bar of a Dublin hotel with a pot of tea and a bucketload of doubt. “Maybe I am one of those people who writes two novels in their 20s then never writes anything else again.”

When, on publication of Rooney’s 2017 debut Conversations with Friends, her editor compared the young Irish novelist to JD Salinger, I’m not sure this is what she had in mind.