"Can I borrow your copy of Normal People?" is the question on all my friends' lips. The second novel by 27-year-old Irish author Sally Rooney, who this week became the youngest ever Costa book prize winner , tells the story of Marianne and Connell who meet at school and proceed to love each other beautifully, but infuriatingly. Sadly it didn’t win the Man Booker this year, but it did sell more copies than any other book on the longlist for the prize. I read it in three hours on a plane journey that felt like three minutes and texted my boyfriend this quote when I landed in a puddle of emotion: "She had tried to be different in the past, as a kind of experiment, but it had never worked. If she was different with Connell, the difference was not happening inside herself, but in between them, in the dynamic." Oof.