Intermezzo
The global #1 bestseller from the author of Normal People
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4.5 • 42 Ratings
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
THE GLOBAL #1 BESTSELLER
'Intermezzo is perfect ... Is there a better novelist at work right now?' Anthony Cummins, Observer
'Her most mature and moving book to date ... I read it in a state of rapture.' Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
'If a perfect Sally Rooney novel exists, this might just be it . Her best novel yet.' Evening Standard
'Rooney has discovered her full literary prowess.' Jo Hamya, Independent
From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family.
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.
Sally Rooney's book Intermezzo was a bestseller w/c 30/09/2024
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We are confirmed Sally Rooney mega fans, and adore her extraordinary observations of people and their innermost feelings. This story feels almost deeper than Normal People and Conversations with Friends, as Rooney explores grief and the troubled relationship between two very different brothers, Ivan and Peter, and the women they’re in love with. The book is painfully delightful in its capturing of how we so frequently misunderstand each other, the feelings we are desperate to hide and how hard it is to be truly honest with others—and ourselves. The relationships are complex and Rooney never gives away easy answers, but we still felt the ending was wonderfully satisfying.
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.
