I’ve just read Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney and loved it. What else can I read in the same vein?
Nicole, London

Sadie Jones is the author of five novels. Her latest, The Snakes, is a dark thriller.
You don’t say what it was that spoke to you about Conversations With Friends: the infidelity, the Dublin setting or the innocents, stumbling through life with no protection but their irony. All three can be found in Rooney’s latest book, Normal People, which has enjoyed huge success this year and will be sure to please.

Staying with Dublin (and the blanket rejection of speech marks), James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also examines youth’s negotiation with convention, but if it’s infidelity you’re after, Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat is arguably her most entertaining novel. It tells the story of a group of 1970s sophisticates in London, whose lives are thrown into disarray on the wicked whim of Julius King, who makes a bet that he can break up the happy and faithful relationship of two gay friends. It’s cool, funny and, ultimately, quite disturbing.

More infidelity, this time not of the cruel sort, can be found in the lyrical, melancholy My Coney Island Baby by Cork-based writer Billy O’Callaghan, which recounts a day in the lives of a couple who’ve met monthly, in secret, for 25 years. But moving back to youth, delight may be found in the misadventures of the naive, knowing Sally Jay Gorce, attempting to conquer the Paris of 1958, in The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy.

Sadie Jones’s The Snakes is out now. Submit your question for book clinic below or email bookclinic@observer.co.uk