Shelfology Book Pairing

A Novel

by Sally Rooney

THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Shortlisted for the British Book Awards 2025 • Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year • Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker • The New York Times • The Globe and Mail • TIME • The Winnipeg Free Press • The Guardian • The Independent • NPR • Dazed • VOX • People • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly • An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time

by Eve Babitz

INTOXICATING ~ EFFERVESCENT ~ HEDONISTIC Iconic LA 'lit girl' Eve Babitz's semi-autobiographical novel of sun, excess and success.Jacaranda - wild child of sun and surf - grows up by the hurling glory of the ocean and believes that good things are infinite. Propelled by drink, drugs and men, she travels headlong through the rip current of West Hollywood's decadent paradise in the pursuit of pleasure. Before long, she is on the edge: the allure of excess threatens her book deal, the patience of her agent and the possibility of a new life.Sex and Rage charts the highs and lows of a life lived at the limits, of creative pursuit and of dazzlingly beautiful people in 1970s LA.