Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the Editor Chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am here with my colleagues. I am here first with Current Affairs

editor at large. Yasmin Nair. Hello, Yasmin. Hi, everyone. I'm also here with Current Affairs

online editor, Lily Sanchez. Hello, Lily. Hi, everyone. So today we're going to, today's book club,

current affairs book club, which we haven't done before. The three of us have gotten together before

to do review and critique and analysis, but the last two times we heard on a very specific

subgenre of thing, which is masterclasses done by people named

Clinton. We did Hillary Clinton's masterclass. We did Bill Clinton's masterclass, neither of which we

cared for. Might have a little more mixed verdicts today. Today we're talking about something

very different. We're going to be talking about one of the most popular writers in the world.

We're talking about the Irish novelist Sally Rooney and her work.

And we're talking about it for a reason, which is that Sally Rooney's novels

have basically talked about more than any other piece of contemporary fiction by anyone.

If you look at the New Yorker, New York Times, The Guardian, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books,

if you crack open any publication that discusses books, people have very strong opinions

on Sally Rooney and her novels. She's been

called the sort of voice of millennial realism in fiction. She writes a lot about the relationships

of young people in our time specifically. Sally Rooney considers herself a Marxist. Jacobin is a big fan of

Sally Rudy's novels because she incorporates a lot of discussions of class and economic precarity.

And her novels tend to be stories of people's love lives and relationships, but they are set against

the backdrop of the 21st century capitalist economy.

She has gotten into some trouble with the right, because she is a vocal proponent of the

boycott, divest, and sanctions movement against Israel and refused to

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