DESCRIPTION

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family--but especially love--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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

REVIEWS

“I admire Intermezzo almost without reservation ... Anyone who has read Rooney’s previous work...is aware that her primary subject is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive ... Wise, resonant, and witty ... There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea ... A mature, sophisticated weeper. It makes a lot of feelings begin to slide around in you ... Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading ... This book charmed and moved me.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times