Intermezzo
A Novel
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4.3 • 85 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Longlisted for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award • Shortlisted for the British Book Awards 2025 • Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year • Foyles Book of the Year • Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker • The New York Times • The Globe and Mail • TIME • The Winnipeg Free Press • The Guardian • The Independent • NPR • Dazed • VOX • People • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this powerhouse tale of love, loss, and longing, the masterful Sally Rooney keeps everyone in check. Siblings Peter and Ivan Koubek couldn’t be more different. Separated by just about every aspect of life, they’ve never had a close relationship. But after their father’s death, the cracks become irreparable chasms. Oddball struggling chess prodigy Ivan falls hard for the not-yet-divorced Margaret, while older brother Peter attempts to balance relationships with his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, who suffers from chronic pain after a car accident, and free-spirited college student and occasional sex worker Naomi. Rooney’s modernist, poetic, and fractured writing about the directionless and depressed lawyer Peter feels intentionally fuzzy, like his head after another sleepless night fuelled by medication and alcohol. This contrasts jaggedly with the giddy and lucid rush of Ivan and Margaret’s blooming love story, with all the awkward self-awareness and developing emotional intelligence you’d expect from a Rooney character. A raw and unfiltered deep dive into family ties and grief, Intermezzo is a full symphony.
