Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney is contemporary cultural fiction that explores love, friendship, sexuality, art, and the complexities of human relationships. Our main character is called Frances. She is a 21-year-old student in Dublin, and her ex-girlfriend Bobbie is the same. They perform spoken word poetry together because they’re cool.
Then there is Melissa, who is a journalist and a photographer. She’s in her mid-30s, and she’s very cool. Her husband, Nick, also in his mid-30s, is an actor, and these two couples meet in the spoken word scene. They fall into this on the back cover, says Minaj. But mostly, it’s about Frances having an affair with Nick.
Books like Conversations With Friends focus on character development and exploring their relationships and inner lives. They offer a glimpse into the lives of young adults facing relationships and the complexities of early adulthood.
5 Books Like Conversations With Friends (Contemporary Literary Fiction)
In the book Conversations With Friends, the author was trying to show that monogamy was based on a commission model that serves the needs of men and patrilineal societies by allowing them to pass property to their genetic offspring.
Non-monogamy could be based entirely on an alternative model, but we said something more like spontaneous consent. Now I will talk about five books similar to Conversations With Friends. Let’s start!
1. Exciting Times
Exciting Times follows Ava’s story, a 22-year-old Irish woman who moves to Hong Kong after university to teach English as a foreign language. She meets Julian’s old English banker and her relationship with Edith, a Hong Kong native educated in the UK. So we get this with Ava’s relationship. Ava teaches English as a foreign language to Hong Kong’s children whose parents pay them to be taught British English.
So it’s quite a lot of meditation on British English versus Irish English. The story is told in the first person by Ava. You can compare this book to Conversations With Friends. The easy comparison to make brings the same debating society at UNI. They know each other, and it’s Irish characters. But they have a very similar vibe. Then we have Edith, who’s like Bobby. Ava romanticizes the concept of the perfect apology, then never acts on it. She is self-destructive, and she loves Edith. Why doesn’t she apologize to Edith?
Author: Naoise Dolan
Average Rating: 3.5/5
Category: LGBTQ Contemporary, Women Fiction
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
2. Girl, Woman, Other
Girl Woman Other is about 12 women’s lives, so each chapter differs. The first chapter is by a woman called AMR, an artist. She also has a teenage daughter named Yaz. Then the next chapter is Yaz, her teenage daughter’s story, so everyone follows on from someone they know.
You have a woman talking, and then the next chapter will be that woman’s mother talking about them or that woman’s grandmother. So they’re all linked in some way to the last person you’ve heard about.
Everyone seems very much linked to AMA, the main character throwing this event, and she’s putting on a play. At the end of the story, there is an after-party where many come together in the same room. So you’ve already found out about their life stories in the chapter. Like Conversations With Friends, It goes into their political opinions on their job, childhood, family structures, and past. Also, it is a little snapshot of short stories about each of those women.
Author: Bernardine Evaristo
Average Rating: 4.4/5
Category: Transgender Fiction
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | MP3 CD
3. Ghosts
There are many differences in how people decide to live their lives in the decade where you feel there are big differences in choices that people have made. You may lose friendships and relationships over that. Ghosts is a book with hidden depths, and the main character deals with real-life problems similar to Conversations With Friends.
So the story is about Nina Dean. She is a successful food writer who, at the end of her 32nd birthday, decides she’s going to sign herself up for, and she’s an online dating site. She’s one of her last friends to be single, and she feels like she’s getting left behind.
Nina matches Max, who tells her he will marry her on the first date. Max and Nina date for a couple of months, then he disappears. So Nina’s been ghosted. The book’s title is Ghosts, and you might be led to believe from the blurb, but those ghosts are all-around online dating in the modern sense.
The life that Ninan thought she would have at this age and the friendships that she thought would stand the test of time. At the same time, there is the story of Nina’s dad and his dementia, which adds a heartbreaking side. It’s very light-hearted women’s fiction, but it has a very sobering side presented so delicately and sensitively. Whether talking about dating in your 30s or how friendships fall by the wayside is so relatable.
Author: Dolly Alderton
Average Rating: 4.2/5
Category: Contemporary Literary Fiction
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
4. A Little Life
Like Conversations With Friends, A Little Life is about the lives of four best friends from college until their 50s. It takes place in New York City and goes about their relationships and dynamics with other relationships with other people.
The whole story overall focuses on one of the main characters. His name is Jude St. Francis, and his past trauma and how his trauma affects his past life and his current life with his current relationship with the people surrounding him. It was very heartbreaking, but at the same time, we’ll go into that heartbreak.
It was devastating because of this one main character, Jude. There are a lot of flashbacks, past and present. You would be reading about a little snippet of a character’s life, and then suddenly, it would go back into the past and explain what they did. They’re dynamic with each other. You will love their true raw peer friendships. It’s very rare, and doesn’t exist for many people to read about it.
Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Average Rating: 4.5/5
Category: Coming of Age Fiction, Family Saga Fiction
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | MP3 CD
5. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is about a happy and mean half-white young man writing a letter to his illiterate mother, knowing she will never read it. So it is a little bit brutally honest and sometimes a little inappropriate. It’s a letter to his mother. This takes no shape or form other than what he talks about.
Ocean Vuong is a poet, and he wrote this book within an inch of its life with beautiful poetry so flowery it’s very fluffy. At times he got hung up on the idea of a comma. But then he kept going on about the comma.
So at times, he kept referring back to metaphors that we’ve already established, and we’re moving on from it. But he kept going back to it. It’s a little bit rambly. There were beautiful moments of insight. This book mainly talks about his relationship with his mother. It was going to be about him and his mother and their relationship. This book does not have a plot. You can feel and taste because the writing is evocative and solid as Conversations With Friends.
Author: Ocean Vuong
Average Rating: 4.4/5
Category: Asian American Literature & Fiction, LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Best Seller)
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
These books cover relationships, including friendships, romantic connections, and power dynamics. They challenge human relationships with depth and authenticity.
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