Loved itI ended up really enjoying conversations with friends surprisingly
Review 1 of 2
Conversations With Friends (2017)
Others: Overwhelmingly positive Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy. Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.
- ISBN:
- 9780571333134
- Length:
- 309 pages
Genres: romance, literary fiction
Lists: …
Similar books
1 of 6
English Animals
Laura Kaye
2017 · 364 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveWhen Mirka gets a job in a country house in rural England, she has no idea of the struggle she faces to make sense of a very English couple, and a way of life that is entirely alien to her. Richard and Sophie are chaotic, drunken, frequently outrageous but also warm, generous and kind to Mirka, despite their argumentative and turbulent marriage. Mirka is swiftly commandeered by Richard for his latest money-making enterprise, taxidermy, and soon surpasses him in skill. After a traumatic break two years ago with her family in Slovakia, Mirka finds to her surprise that she is happy at Fairmont Hall. But when she tells Sophie that she is gay, everything she values is put in danger and she must learn the hard way what she really believes in.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also literary fiction and romance84%MercysBookishMusings loved both14%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations2%Open Water
Caleb Azumah Nelson
2021 · 160 pages · 4 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positive"In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists--he a photographer, she a dancer--and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control. Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty. This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent"--
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also literary fiction and romance90%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations10%Greek Lessons
Han Kang
2023 · 176 pages · 1 review
Others: NeutralNow and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.” In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to each other. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression. Greek Lessons is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also literary fiction and romance92%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations8%Heart the Lover
Lily King
2025 · 256 pages · 5 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveYou knew I’d write a book about you someday. Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules. In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also literary fiction and romance92%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations8%Rachel Incident
Caroline O'Donoghue
2023 · 1 review
Others: PositiveA brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also literary fiction and romance93%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations7%Green Dot
Madeleine Gray
2024 · 320 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive“Madeleine Gray takes a scalpel to millennial malaise, office romance, and infidelity, and the result is a brainy, gutsy, nervy—and hilarious—wonder of a novel.”—Meg Howrey, author of They're Going to Love You"Simon’s sarcastic delivery captures the emotions of a heroine with the desire to be powerful in a world in which she is powerless. Simon’s narration wavers between the overconfidence of youth and the insecurity of someone who knows she’s in the wrong. This is a perfect audiobook for fans of the show Fleabag." —AudioFile on Green DotAn irresistible and messy love story about the terrible allure of wanting something that promises nothingAt twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet—a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she's preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife—and that she has no idea Hera exists.With its daringly specific and intimate voice, Green Dot is a darkly hilarious and deeply felt examination of the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the twenty-first century and the winding, tortuous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also literary fiction and romance93%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations7%
Loved it
Loved itI really enjoyed Conversations with Friends... Conversations with Friends just below.
Loved iti could rank them i would rank them conversations with friends beautiful world where are you which came out this year in september and normal people adored all of them
Loved itIf I had to say what my favorite read of the year was I think it would be this just for how unique it felt and how much it evoked in me like how much it made me think about certain conversations these characters had just yeah it really pushed and affected my life really deeply and I just absolutely loved it.
MixedI actually only gave this book three stars back in the days when I read it but it's one of those novels that grows on you and since then I've been thinking back on it and feeling much more grateful about the story. It's a shocker as well even though it's also very slow going, as you can hear it's a very mixed bag of things.