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.