Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney crackingly brilliant first novel about high-risk relationships, youth, and love caused a serious stir last year when Faber outbid six other publishers for the rights. With a perfectly contemporary yet light touch, Conversations with Friends addresses politics, feminism, sex, love and how power operates in relationships. Her fiction has also featured in the Dublin Review, the Stinging Fly and Granta. Lisa Mc McInerney described Rooney as having ‘the sharpest eye for all of the most delicate cruelties of human interaction’.

The event is chaired by broadcaster Rick O'Shea.