Intermezzo

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An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties — successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women — his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude — a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

"The most talked-about author of her generation returns with a hotly awaited fourth book . . . With a Joycean tang to the prose, it continues the deepening of her style since the crystalline insouciance of her 2017 debut Conversations with Friends."  --Anthony Cummins, The Guardian

"Stylistically daring, emotionally explosive, and endlessly wise, this is Rooney's best work yet."  -- Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily (Best of Fall)

 

"[Intermezzo] might be her best yet: a tale of depth and grand sweep, an understated study of characters caught circling the margin of some great and unknown thing, and a diversion of pure enjoyment, too. Rooney's title tells us these brothers, in their love and fury for one another, are at an in-between moment, as she carefully, brilliantly writes them out of it."  --Booklist (starred review)

"Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement . . . The novel's deliberate pacing veers from the propulsiveness of Normal People and the deep character work contrasts with the topicality of Beautiful World, but in many ways this feels like Rooney's most fully realized work, especially as she channels the modernist styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf . . . Even the author's skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel's forceful currents of feeling."  --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she's best at--sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues--with newer moves . . . The characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real . . . Her grandmaster status remains intact."  --Kirkus Reviews

Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Beautiful World, Where Are You; Conversations with Friends; and Normal People. She also contributed to the writing and production of the Hulu/BBC television adaptation of Normal People.