Sally Rooney dashes hopes of another TV adaptation

If you’ve been holding out hope for another Sally Rooney TV adaptation, you might be waiting a while longer.

The author, whose fourth book Intermezzo is being released on Tuesday, has said she’s ‘taking a break’ from TV work.

Speaking to The New York Times, Sally said: ‘I felt like it was just time to take a break from that and let the book be its own thing for a while.’

She was referring to her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, in the interview and continued to say that while working on the screen adaptation of Normal People was ‘amazing’, it was also ‘a lot’ more than she expected.

Sally co-wrote the TV version of Normal People and said: ‘The experience of working on [Normal People] had been, in so many ways, amazing – the team of people involved in it. But it did also feel like a really big job.

‘Then, when the show was broadcast, that felt like a lot in terms of the amount of discourse that it generated and the amount of media attention.

'I felt like, okay, now I know that my books are where I belong and that’s all that I want to be doing.’

Normal People was a huge hit when it was released and became the BBC’s most streamed show of 2020, with 62.7m views. It had a further three million views on RTÉ Player and even more on Hulu.

It also catapulted Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal to fame with both actors going on to star in big-budget films such as Where The Crawdads Sing as well as Gladiator II.

Sally’s latest work, Intermezzo, is about two brothers navigating the death of their father while also exploring their personal connections.

Critics have hailed the tale, with The Guardian dubbing it ‘breathtakingly intimate’. We can't wait to read it!