But it’s a trickier tale to translate to TV. Conversations With Friends is arguably the better book than Normal People. But, with a new BBC adaptation, has Sally Rooney TV lightning struck twice? Yes and no. Laying out the hopes, fears and affairs of Generation Anxiety, the book is a masterpiece.

Two postgraduate friends and former lovers – bolshy, precocious Bobbi and shy, plain Frances – become embroiled with an older, married middle-class couple, Nick and Melissa. Like Normal People, Conversation With Friends explores what happens when love collides with shy ambition. The following year she published Normal People (one million copies sold to date) and then came the BBC adaptation: a genuine phenomenon that made global superstars of its sizzling hot lead actors, Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, and provided the most effective balm for the first lockdown. There’s welcome space for the actors to convey emotion that isn’t expressed through dialogue.When Sally Rooney published her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017 it established her as Jane Austen for Millennials – Rooney’s concise dialogue slicing straight through the emotional complexity of courtship and identity. There’s forensic attention to interior worlds, to the roiling thoughts and feelings beneath the surface, the desires, tensions, jealousies and resentments. There’s also a deliberately unhurried pace, allowing viewers time to absorb the nuances of the relationships, to focus on the characters’ expressions, gestures and silences. Perhaps anticipating the criticism that it’s another dive into the petty problems of privileged white folk is the casting of Bobbi as a black expat New Yorker.

And again there’s a European vacation, this time a fourth-episode trip to coastal Croatia (changed from the French countryside in the book). Again, there’s an uncomfortable affair driven by sexual desire and there are evident economic differences between Melissa and Nick and the financially constrained college students. Watching the two series, or reading the books, one can detect Rooney honing her craft and her concerns. Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Frances (Alison Oliver) share an intimate moment in Conversations with Friends.

Conversations with friends book review