Hello, this is Everything Else, the FT Culture Podcast.

I'm Al. And I'm Gris. First up, we'll be talking to Sally Rooney, author of the hit novel,

Conversations with Friends, and now a new novel, Normal People.

And later, we'll be talking to David Shrigley about comedy in art.

So Chris, Sally Rooney, the author of Conversations with Friends.

Yeah, I mean, even for people who haven't read it, you probably will have seen posters

of this cover, a bright yellow cover. It won lots of awards last year. She's, it's her first ever novel.

She's 27. You know, she was in her early 20s when she wrote it. It's a brilliant kind of

dissection of millennial life for two undergraduates in Dublin.

It's a kind of romantic entanglement that they get into with an older married couple.

Really it's a brilliant portrayal of a complicated friendship.

It's the kind of book that when you're reading, it feels much more important than your actual life,

and anything that interrupts your reading of the book is intensely annoying,

and all you want to do is sit for a whole weekend and read it, which is what I did.

It's completely engrossing, very funny, very dialogue-based.

Wow.

Highly, highly recommend it.

And so now she's just followed up with a new novel, Normal People.

So she's precocious, isn't she?

She's often described.

Precociously brilliant.

As she is often described as precocious.

...