Sally Rooney

In 2022, when the Irish writer Sally Rooney was thirty-one, she was named one of Time’s hundred most influential people in the world. Her début novel, “Conversations with Friends,” had been published five years earlier and quickly found a seemingly obsessed readership, which carried over to her second book, “Normal People,” and her third, “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” Soon Rooney was being hailed as the voice of her generation. What hit a nerve was perhaps the immediacy of her work, the intensity of the relationships and interactions between her characters, which seem to be experienced by the reader, rather than observed, through language, from an omniscient distance. Perhaps it was also Rooney’s awareness of those relationships and interactions as part of a larger web of behavior, guided or controlled by sociopolitical structures. “I’m trying to show the reality of a social condition as it is connected to broader systems,” she said, in a profile for The New Yorker. “You would hope that by trying to show those things in process you can say, It doesn’t have to be this way.” Rooney’s fourth novel, “Intermezzo,” will be published in September, 2024.