Intermezzo

THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New Yorker Essential Read • Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year

Named Best Book of the Year by The New York Times • The Globe and Mail • TIME • The Winnipeg Free Press • NPR • DAZED • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

“Sally Rooney’s books are so beloved, sometimes it seems the whole world is a Sally Rooney book club.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

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.