Intermezzo
A Novel
-
-
4.3 • 75 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Nominated 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement (after Beautiful World, Where Are You). After their father dies, brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek drift further apart. Peter, 32, is a depressed Dublin lawyer torn between his college girlfriend, Sylvia, who broke up with him with after she suffered a disabling accident six years earlier, and 23-year-old Naomi, a sometime sex worker. Ivan, 22, is a socially inept pro chess player whose wunderkind status is in doubt when he meets and falls for 36-year-old near-divorcée Margaret at a tournament. Peter's reflexive disapproval of the age gap in Ivan and Margaret's relationship causes a permanent rift, and Rooney crosscuts between their perspectives as they ruminate on their father's death and their complicated romances. 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. Underlining Peter's rudderlessness, she writes, "Lamplight. Walking her to the library under the trees. Live again one day of that life and die. Cold wind in his eyes stinging like tears. Woman much missed." Moreover, her focus on Peter and Ivan's complicated fraternal bond pays enormous dividends. Even the author's skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel's forceful currents of feeling.
