BBC Creative celebrates BBC Three’s Conversation With Friends in bookshops across Northern Ireland

To celebrate the new BBC Three drama, Conversation with Friends, based on a best-selling book by Sally Rooney (Normal People), BBC Creative – the BBC's BAFTA award-winning in-house creative agency – sprinkled some literary magic across Northern Ireland.

The team created a special Conversation with Friends book, which instead of the novel’s text contained a QR code linked to the trail for the show on BBC iPlayer. The books were snuck onto the shelves of independent bookshops alongside usual copies of the book across 16 locations in Northern Ireland, where much of the BBC series was filmed.

The limited edition book cover was created by Henn Kim who illustrated the official book cover for Normal People. It features a bespoke illustration inspired by the iconic sardine can image from the Normal People book cover. This recreation featured the four Conversations with Friends characters intertwined with one another to symbolise their complicated relationships, explored in the series.

The stunt was later amplified on social media to grow awareness about the drama series through image and video assets captioning the special edition of the novel, and bringing the creative campaign to audiences across the UK.