Rooney Fever Sweeps the Nation
Director Lenny Abrahamson’s TV adaptation of Rooney’s second book Normal People has undoubtedly been a runaway success. RTÉ reported record breaking figures with 371,000 viewers tuning in for the first two episodes (live and on catch up).
UK figures are even more impressive with the BBC reporting a staggering 16.2M views in its first week on streaming service iPlayer. Not to mention the now infamous Liveline discussion where a caller described a scene from the series to Joe Duffy as something from a ‘porno’, undoubtedly helping to fuel ‘Rooney Fever’—incidentally this was the most-listened-to radio clip from that week.
The difficult, (and some might argue unhealthy), relationship between the two protagonists, Connell played by Paul Mescal and Marianne played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, has certainly captured the nation (the S.E.X. absolutely unrelated!).
First published in 2019 by Faber & Faber, over one million copies of Normal People have been sold and the book has now re-entered the bestseller charts, ranking no.1 in Ireland for Adult Fiction (4,740 units reported by Nielsen for month of April 2020) and Overall for Ireland, followed by Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing in second place (4,251 units reported by Nielsen for month of April 2020).
See the full bestseller top 10 Irish charts for April here:https://booksirelandmagazine.com/category/bestseller-charts/
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