If you find yourself losing interest around the 100-page mark of this novel, don't feel guilty: the same thing happened to the author.

What a stunningly lazy work - not a character in it worth caring about, not a clever turn of phrase to be found anywhere, not even the fraying thread of a plot to sustain your interest.

Getting through this book was like wading through a marsh: sucking at your wellingtons are limp sex scenes, pretentious observations about "life", characters repeatedly getting it on and then pondering whether or not they are in a relationship. Much has been made about how this book captures the mindset of Millennials. If this is the next generation, we are in real difficulties.

Honestly - don't pay money for this book. If you're truly determined to ignore the warnings, get it from a library - or a friend (but only when they've stopped fuming over being cheated out money they could have spent enjoying four coffees and a muffin).

Irish author Sally Rooney dazzled readers worldwide last year with her brilliant debut, Conversations With Friends, but the cool ease with which she has produced her second book shows an author more determined to write good prose and lots of it than to prove herself as a standout literary talent. Rooney’s talent doesn’t need proving though - her beautiful new book Normal People speaks for itself.

Normal People begins quietly enough in a small Irish town in Sligo, where Marianne lives with her family in a mansion and Connell is the son of the woman who cleans it. What starts out as tentative flirting between them grows into an on-and-off relationship that can never seem to shake off the shackles of teenage insecurity, even as they leave Sligo for student life in Trinity College, Dublin. Connell’s self-consciousness about his working-class background and the psychological fallout of Marianne’s oppressive childhood colour their relationship well into their college years as they drift together and apart in a cycle that’s dysfunctional yet somehow totally self-affirming. This is an intense and complicated love story, but Rooney is an exceptional writer who explores Marianne and Connell’s relationship with incredible delicacy. Her characters are so richly drawn that you feel their emotions as if they were your own.

I simply cannot get this book out of my head, but nor do I want to - it really is just that good.