Have you read Normal People yet? Have you been asked if you’ve read Normal People yet? It feels like Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel is everywhere lately.
It tells a coming-of-age, millennial love story set in the 2010s, following Irish teenagers Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron as they grow into a complicated relationship with one another. Normal People has been hailed as the “book of the year,” with Rooney being called “the voice of our generation” which makes sense, given that the speed bumps of Marianne and Connell’s romance—class conflict, anxiety, and miscommunication—characterize so much of millennial ennui.
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And because we all love a great millennial romance, Normal People is already being made into a TV show. Hulu just picked it up for a 12-episode, half-hour drama series, according to Deadline, making it one of the many best-selling-book-to-TV adaptations that Hulu has snatched up lately—a list that includes Celeste Ng’s bestseller Little Fires Everywhere, the George Clooney starring satirical classic Catch-22, and, obviously, Handmaid’s Tale. It also joins a straight-up legion of streaming shows centering on millennial romance—there’s Easy, Love, Master of None, Jane the Virgin, Insecure. You get the idea.
“From the moment we read Normal People, we were smitten,” Beatrice Springborn, Hulu’s VP Content Development, said in a statement. “This anatomy of a will-they-or-won’t-they romance perfectly and uniquely captures the highs and lows of young true love.”
According to the statement, the show is being made by Element Pictures in association with BBC Three, and is executive produced by Lenny Abrahamson, the executive producer of Room. Rooney herself has adapted the book for TV, working with Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe. Daisy Edgar-Jones (Cold Feet) will be playing Marianne and newcomer Paul Mescal will portray Connell.
Seeing as the show isn’t slated for release until 2020, that should leave plenty of time to read the book—or you can just keep binging millennial romance from a TV or laptop and your couch.
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