by Sally Rooney
Intermezzo – a chess move, a composition of music, and now, Sally Rooney’s latest novel, which critics have called “utterly perfect”.
The Irish author’s fourth book swaps out her usual female protagonist and instead follows the relationship between two grieving brothers who are both in age-gap relationships and think they have little in common.
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