Sally Rooney’s sentences are droll, nimble and matter-of-fact. There’s nothing particularly special about them, except for the way she throws them. She’s like one of those elite magicians who can make a playing card pierce the rind of a watermelon.

Rooney employs this artery-nicking style while writing about love and lust among damaged and isolated and yearning young people. They’re as lonely as Frank Sinatra on some of his album covers, as lonely as Hank Williams’s whip-poor-will. The effect can be entrancing.

You’ve likely heard of Rooney. She’s the young author, born in 1991 in the west of Ireland, who was excellently profiled by Lauren Collins last year in The New Yorker. She has written two fresh and accessible novels, “Conversations With Friends” (2017) and now “Normal People,” which have been met with euphoric reviews in the Anglo-Irish press. “Normal People” was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Rooney’s new one is a lot like her old one; her books glide along similar tracks and can bleed together in your mind. Both are about intense but furtive love affairs that are thwarted by misunderstanding after misunderstanding.