Intermezzo

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

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

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent & apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep & struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love, Sylvia, & 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 & intensely intertwined. 

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

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Sally Rooney is the Irish author of the novels Conversations with Friends, Normal People, & Beautiful World, Where Are You. She was the winner of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. Normal People (‘the literary phenomenon of the decade’, Guardian) was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019, won the Costa Novel of the Year 2018 & the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award 2019. Sally Rooney co-wrote the television adaptation of Normal People which was broadcast on the BBC & Hulu in 2020.