Normal People follows Connell and Marianne through several years of a relationship that starts in secondary school in County Sligo and continues through Trinity College Dublin — a relationship defined by shifting power dynamics, class difference, and the peculiarly modern difficulty of saying what you mean to someone you care about. Rooney's prose is stripped down and clinical, more interested in what characters think than in what they do, and the novel's achievement is making the reader understand exactly how two intelligent people repeatedly fail to communicate the obvious. It is a novel about desire and about the ways class shapes desire, and about the gap between what people feel and what they are able to say. If you want something similar, the comparison depends on what you most valued in it.
The closest novel in the literary fiction shelf to Normal People's concern with people who fail, repeatedly, to give each other what they need is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Stevens, the butler narrator, is far more emotionally repressed than either of Rooney's characters — his evasions are more total, and his final accounting of what he lost more devastating — but the dynamic is recognisable. Here is a person capable of deep feeling, who has constructed a professional identity that prevents feeling from being expressed or even fully acknowledged, and who arrives at old age having failed to act on the one relationship that might have given his life a different shape. The Remains of the Day is colder than Normal People and its setting — the English country house, the decline of aristocracy — is more remote, but the underlying situation is the same: two people, a missed connection, a final reckoning. Ishiguro's restraint is absolute; Rooney's is relative; both produce novels that hurt in similar ways.
John Williams's Stoner shares Normal People's interest in characters whose inner lives are richer and more precise than their external circumstances — and in the institutional settings that shape those lives. Stoner is trapped in his academic world much as Marianne is trapped in her class world and Connell in his. The difference is scale: Stoner's novel spans a lifetime, Rooney's a handful of years. Williams has no interest in romantic plot; the love affair in Stoner is one of several experiences that define a life, not the central concern. But the quality of observation — the patient attention to what a person feels in their body and mind, in the presence of another person — is comparable. If you found Normal People compelling partly because of its careful interiority, Stoner will feel familiar.
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is a different comparison — structurally unlike Normal People, but sharing its interest in people who exist slightly outside the social arrangements everyone around them takes for granted. Ruth and her sister Lucille are raised by a series of female relatives in a small Idaho town, and the novel is about whether Ruth will follow her transient aunt Sylvie out of conventional domestic life or find a way to stay. The novel is less concerned with desire than Normal People and more with belonging and the refusal of it. Rooney's characters negotiate whether they belong to each other and to the social worlds they move through. Robinson's character negotiates the same question in solitude. Both novels are on the literary fiction shelf, and both reward reading slowly.
What makes Normal People the book it is — beyond the love story — is Rooney's interest in how power moves between people who care about each other, and how class structures that power in ways neither party quite acknowledges. That combination of intimacy and social analysis is harder to find than either quality separately. The Remains of the Day has the social analysis without the intimacy. Stoner has the intimacy without the social analysis. Housekeeping has something else entirely: a refusal of the social arrangements that both Rooney and Ishiguro treat as given. All three are worth reading after Normal People. None of them will replace it exactly, because Normal People is doing something fairly specific to its moment. But they will deepen the experience of it.