Intermezzo

A Novel

By: Sally Rooney

Narrated by: Éanna Hardwicke

Length: Not Yet Known

Publisher's summary

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.

©2024 Sally Rooney (P)2024 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

“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)

“Sally Rooney's plangent, philosophical fourth novel reflects her growing literary and emotional maturity, while continuing her forensic dissection of intimacy, connection and desire. . . . This lyrical story of fraternal friction, emotional crisis and unexpected love interrogates the significance of romantic age gaps and relationship norms against a backdrop of societal judgement, overturning readers' expectations alongside those of its characters.”—The Bookseller