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I don't know what it is about Sally Rooney, but her books make me utterly depressed and yet I kind of love them. This one perhaps even more so than Conversations with Friends.

We follow Connell and Marianne through the end of their school years in a small town in Connaught, and through their years studying at Trinity in Dublin. Marianne comes from a wealthy family, but is abused by them. Connell comes from a working class background and in fact his mother is the cleaner at Marianne's family home. Connell's mother is loving and warm, and Connell is popular in school. Marianne is an outsider at school as well as at home. The two of them form a secret relationship that ends due to external pressures and expectations. When they meet again in university, Marianne is the popular one and Connell the outsider.

The novel is really all about the two of them, their relationship to each other, and how they are formed by the expectations and opinions of others. It's a quiet story with deep and detailed characters, real and complex emotions. I found myself getting very frustrated with the both of them, but at the same time I found their thoughts and actions believable and relatable. Rooney has a way of writing very specific and layered characters that, although they are nothing like me, resonate with me on some deep emotional level.

The ending was kind of unsatisfying and yet inevitable and also beautiful.

My only minor niggle is that I found it a bit too fragmented at times. The novel jumps ahead months at a time and usually quite quickly. And although we get to hear what has happened in the meantime, I found myself wishing we could stay in certain times and places a little longer.

(I listened to the audio book, and though I cannot say enough good things about Aiofe McMahon as a narrator, she cannot do a Swedish accent - it came out vaguely Russian)