Looking for a list of all the books mentioned in Normal People by Sally Rooney? This list of books read by Connell and Marianne in Normal People puts them into context in the story and summarises them so you can see if you want to read them too!
Connell and Marianne are both top students at their local school in Sligo, excelling in every subject.
Marianne knows she is smart and she sets her sights on the prestigious Trinity College Dublin, where she attains a place to study history and politics.
Thanks to a push from Marianne, Connell also attains a place there and elects to study English literature, instead of law at Galway as he had originally planned (read this post if you want to know how I went from being a French literature student to a law student!).
They’re both bookish people – smart, introverted, curious – and they discuss books at various points throughout the novel.
If you want to read as Connell and Marianne did then the below book list is for you. Here are all the books mentioned in Normal People, in order.
Amazing book deals you don’t want to miss
Blackwells: Free worldwide delivery on every order
Audible: Get 1 audiobook free plus all Audible originals
Kindle: Save up to 80% on Kindle book deals
Prime Reading: Unlimited access to a rotating catalogue of e-books
Books Mentioned In Normal People
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
When is this book mentioned in Normal People?
The Communist Manifesto (or Manifesto of the Communist Party) is mentioned just as Marianne and Connell are beginning to develop feelings for each other.
Marianne has already told Connell she likes him so he starts coming over to her house more often to pick his mother up.
“They talked a little bit, or she talked and he nodded. He told her she should try reading The Communist Manifesto, he thought she would like it, and he offered to write down the title for her so she wouldn’t forget. I know what The Communist Manifesto is called, she said. He shrugged, okay. After a moment he added, smiling: You’re trying to act superior, but like, you haven’t even read it. She had to laugh then, and he laughed because she did.” p13.
What is this book about?
The Communist Manifesto was first published in London in 1848, by two young men in their late twenties. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to be recognised as one of the most important political texts ever written.
Maintaining that the history of all societies is a history of class struggle, the manifesto proclaims that communism is the only route to equality, and is a call to action aimed at the proletariat. It is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand our modern political landscape.
Buy The Communist Manifesto: Amazon | Blackwells | Waterstones
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
When is this book mentioned in Normal People?
Marianne lends a copy of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin to Connell to read. She finds it in the study and hands it to him so he can read the back cover.
When Marianne asks if Connell’s friends know that he reads a lot outside of school, he says that they wouldn’t be interested and probably wouldn’t be reading books about racism.
p14.
What is this book about?
‘We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation’
James Baldwin’s impassioned plea to ‘end the racial nightmare’ in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement.
Told in the form of two intensely personal ‘letters’, The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.
Buy The Fire Next Time: Amazon | Blackwells | Waterstones
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
When is this book mentioned in Normal People?
Swann’s Way by Proust is mentioned as Connell begins to realise just how drawn to Marianne he is.
“He’s moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. Her hair and clothing. The copy of Swann’s Way she reads at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, with a dark French painting on the cover and a mint-coloured spin. Her long fingers turning the pages.” p25.
I studied Swann’s Way in my first year of university and will never forget the madeleine scene!
READ MORE: 15 French Classics You Need to Read
What is this book about?
The Way by Swann’s is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine.
It contains the separate short novel, A Love of Swann’s, a study of sexual jealousy that forms a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time.
This book established Proust as one of the greatest voices of the modern age – satirical, sceptical, confiding and endlessly varied in his responses to the human condition.
Buy Swann’s Way: Amazon | Blackwells | Waterstones
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
When is this book mentioned in Normal People?
Marianne changes the trajectory of Connell’s entire life when she persuades him to go to Trinity College Dublin to study English instead of law at a college in Galway. In his own words…
“On the other hand, he could go to Trinity like Marianne. Life would be different then. He would start going to dinner parties and having conversations about the Greek bailout. He could f**k some weird-looking girls who turn out to be bisexual. I’ve read The Golden Notebook, he could tell them. It’s true, he has read it.” p26.
Sadly for Connell things don’t turn out quite that way and the fact he has read The Golden Notebook didn’t end up winning him any girls at university. But I find his inner monologue fascinating!
What is this book about?
The landmark novel of the Sixties – a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity while facing rejection and betrayal.
In 1950s London, novelist Anna Wulf struggles with writer’s block. Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow for emotions, blue for everyday events. But it is a fifth notebook – the golden notebook – that finally pulls these wayward strands of her life together.
Widely regarded as Doris Lessing’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, ‘The Golden Notebook’ is wry and perceptive, bold and indispensable.
Buy The Golden Notebook: Amazon | Blackwells | Waterstones
Emma by Jane Austen
When is this book mentioned in Normal People?
Classes have started at Trinity College but the roles are now reversed and Connell is the one struggling to fit in. He eats alone, in the same Marianne used to at school.
Below is one of my favourite Normal People quotes and it’s all about the magic of reading:
“Not having friends to eat with, he reads over lunch. At the weekends when there’s football on, he checks the team news and then goes back to reading instead of watching the build-up. One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma where it seems like Mr Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectual unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’.” p68.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: 17 Best Quotes from Normal People
Now I need to know what happens to Emma and Mr Knightley! I read about half of Emma a few years back but it didn’t capture my attention in the same way Austen’s other novels did. I’ll have to give it another go.
What is this book about?
Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances’ love affairs.
Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance.
Buy Emma: Amazon | Blackwells | Waterstones
Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
When is this book mentioned in Normal People?
Connell has to give a presentation about Le Morte D’Arthur before the end of his first term and bless him he was so nervous!
His hands shake and he doesn’t look up from his notes to see if anyone is actually listening to him. His voice wavers and he thinks that “if he hadn’t been seated, he would have fallen to the ground”.
I always hated presentations at school and university and can totally relate to this intense feeling of anxiety.
But it turns out his anxiety was misplaced as his presentation was considered to be very impressive and one of his classmates even calls him a genius (albeit in a dismissive tone).
Not only was Connell the smartest in Sligo, but he also attains the highest grades in all but one module at Trinity! Quite a feat.
What is this book about?
Le Morte D’Arthur is Sir Thomas Malory’s richly evocative and enthralling version of the Arthurian legend.
Recounting Arthur’s birth, his ascendancy to the throne after claiming Excalibur, his ill-fated marriage to Guenever, the treachery of Morgan le Fay and the exploits of the Knights of the Round Table, it magically weaves together adventure, battle, love and enchantment.
Le Morte D’Arthur looks back to an idealized Medieval world and is full of wistful, elegiac regret for a vanished age of chivalry.
Edited and published by William Caxton in 1485, Malory’s prose romance drew on French and English verse sources to give an epic unity to the Arthur myth, and remains the most magnificent re-telling of the story in English.
Buy Le Morte d’Arthur: Amazon | Blackwells | Waterstones
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
When is this book mentioned in Normal People?
We fast forward in time now and Connell, Elaine and Niall have been backpacking around Europe after their first year at Trinity. This is only possible for Connell as he received a university scholarship meaning his rent is now paid, his tuition covered and his meals are provided for.
In his backpack, he carries “a very beaten-up copy of a James Salter novel”. Whilst the text doesn’t actually specify which James Salter novel Connell is reading, having done a bit of digging I am convinced it is A Sport and a Pastime.
Why?
In an interview with Hazlitt, Rooney mentions this book stating it’s a “really, really interesting book” and notes that nothing really happens in it.
Sound familiar?
In Rooney’s own words: “It’s a really, really interesting book. And I’m not actually familiar with the rest of Salter’s work, I’ve read some of his short stories, and I’ve read this one book, and I’m sort of working my way through the rest of his work and his novels and stories, but A Sport and a Pastime is, I guess it’s an erotic novel. It’s set in France, it was published in the late 1960s, ’67 or ’68, and it’s a really, really intense exploration of intimacy between these two characters. Nothing really happens in the book other than the development of this really intense sexual relationship. And that book blew me away when I read it.“
p158.
What is this book about?
The 1960s. Philip Dean, a footloose Yale dropout, is touring provincial France and sometimes Paris in a borrowed, once elegant car. He begins a mismatched affair with a young shop girl named Anne-Marie. Together they burn in an everyday but stunningly sensual paradise.
A Sport and A Pastime is a seductive classic that established James Salter’s reputation as one of the finest writers of our time. It is remarkable for its eroticism, its luminous prose and its ability to explore the boundaries between what is dreamt and what is lived, between body and soul.
Buy A Sport and a Pastime: Amazon | Blackwells | Waterstones
Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
When is this book mentioned in Normal People?
In addition to the beaten-up James Salter novel, Connell is also carrying an edition of Frank O’Hara’s selected poems which he found in an English-language bookshop in Berlin. He’s brought this for Marianne.
Friends and couples that buy books for each other are the best kind!
p158.
What is this book about?
Frank O’Hara (1926-66) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate (‘any time, any place’).
This is not the whole O’Hara: he may have scribbled poems on serviettes, but others he worked on with intense concentration, creating sequences that are inexhaustibly nuanced, full of surprise, heartbreak and laughter.
There are analogies between his work and that of the painters he championed, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning among them.
He is resolutely metropolitan, and his metropolis is New York City. He brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, quandaries and exhilarations, of its mid-twentieth-century life.
Buy Frank O’Hara’s Selected Poems: Amazon | Blackwells | Waterstones
Bonus: Hodges Figgis – Dublin Bookshop
As an added bonus, I thought I’d add in Hodges Figgis bookshop, which is Ireland’s oldest bookshop and said to be the third oldest bookshop in the world.
It’s outside of this Dublin bookshop where Helen, Connell’s girlfriend, and Marianne first meet. Connell and Helen are walking down the street holding hands when Marianne exits the bookshop wearing a black beret.
Connell wants to drop Helen’s hand but can’t bring himself to do it.
Awkward!
p165.
READ MORE: Best Dublin Bookshops to Visit
What do you think of Connell and Marianne’s taste in books? Have you read many of these books mentioned in Normal People? Let me know in the comments below!
If you liked this post, you’ll also love:
11 Books to Read if You Loved Normal People
17 Best Quotes from Normal People
11 Normal People Book Club Questions
Best Bookshops in Dublin
Literary Tour of Dublin
Laura
Founder & Editor of What’s Hot?