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.

“Beautiful World combines the intricacies of Rooney’s lightning-rod style, like her deep well of sympathy for her characters and her precise economy of language, with a growing maturity.” -Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

“A tour de force. The dialogue never falters, and the prose burns up the page.” -Anne Enright, The Guardian

“Three novels in, and it’s still what Rooney does best: ensnare us over and over in the jet-fueled heat between good-looking (and supernaturally articulate) Irish youths . . . Each sentence builds like a brushstroke." -Delia Cai, Vanity Fair

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.