Intermezzo

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.

Review

The literary phenomenon of the decade. ― Guardian on NORMAL PEOPLE

I love Sally Rooney. She has many imitators, but few equals. -- Zadie Smith

I can't think of another writer who so perfectly captures the intensity and the pain of both friendship and romantic love. ― Red

Rooney has been called the voice of her generation (and she probably is), but her talents are greater than that. Her genius for capturing people with all their self-conceits and occasional virtues puts her in a fine tradition of sharp social observation stretching back to Jane Austen. ― The Times

About the Author

Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You. She was the winner of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. Normal People ('the literary phenomenon of the decade', Guardian) was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019, won the Costa Novel of the Year 2018 and the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award 2019. Sally Rooney co-wrote the television adaptation of Normal People which was broadcast on the BBC in 2020.