Books like David Nicholls

Connell and Marianne understand each other with an intensity that repeatedly fails to make their relationship simple. As they move from school into university, shifts in confidence, class, and social power keep altering who needs whom—and who can admit it.

Rooney shares Nicholls’s fascination with timing: the tiny hesitation or unspoken sentence that can redirect years. Her prose is cooler and more compressed, but the emotional effect is just as consuming. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and embraced by a huge, devoted readership, Normal People has become a defining novel of modern intimacy because it makes every reunion feel charged with all the lives its characters might have lived together.

At a summer camp in the 1970s, six gifted teenagers give themselves the grandiose name “the Interestings.” Wolitzer then follows them into adulthood, watching talent, money, envy, loyalty, and luck reshape the friendships they once assumed would define them forever.

This is the choice for readers who loved not only Emma and Dexter’s relationship but One Day’s larger ache: the spectacle of young people becoming middle-aged without quite noticing it. Wolitzer is superb on the gap between the exceptional lives we imagine and the compromised lives we actually inhabit. Expansive, witty, and piercingly observant, The Interestings has earned lasting admiration as a great American novel of friendship and ambition; by its end, these people feel less like characters than friends whose whole history you somehow remember.

For the comic generosity of Us, start here. Graham’s second wife, Audra, is exuberantly sociable; his first, Elspeth, is forbiddingly composed; Graham himself watches both with bewildered affection. Their son’s intense enthusiasms add another layer to a household that never behaves as neatly as anyone hopes.

Heiny is exceptionally funny about irritation without making affection seem foolish. Like Nicholls, she understands marriage as an accumulation of private jokes, compromises and failures of attention. This word-of-mouth favourite is one of the rare contemporary novels whose jokes make its tenderness sharper rather than safer.

Nicholls’s Douglas keeps discovering that sincerity does not guarantee understanding; Anne Tyler builds an entire marriage around that painful truth. Michael and Pauline fall in love young, then spend decades confronting the distance between romantic certainty and daily compatibility.

Tyler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of ordinary family life, notices the revealing domestic detail: the recurring quarrel, the gesture misread, the grievance polished through repetition. She refuses to appoint a villain. Instead, she makes two imperfect people wholly legible, producing the same chastening recognition as Us: you can love someone deeply and still be disastrously unskilled at loving them.

Retired literary agent Joe Allston is dry, defensive and uncomfortably aware of age. When an old postcard prompts him and his wife to revisit a diary from years earlier, their shared past begins to feel less settled than either had supposed.

The kinship with Us lies in the rueful male voice and in the way memory exposes both self-deception and durable intimacy. Stegner’s prose is more austere than Nicholls’s, but his portrait of a long marriage has the same mixture of exasperation, loyalty and belated understanding. Winner of the National Book Award, it is a quietly devastating novel about what spouses know, conceal and preserve for one another.