Intermezzo

A Novel

By: Sally Rooney

Narrated by: Éanna Hardwicke

THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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.

©2024 Sally Rooney (P)2024 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

“Intermezzo reaffirms Rooney’s ability to capture the thrill and desperation of blooming romance, and to portray a microcosm of human existence with precision and insight.”—The Globe and Mail

“[Rooney’s] novels. . . . are precisely observed relationship studies that deftly weave together politics, sex, moral philosophy, dry humour and a distinctly millennial unease with the state of the world. . . .Fans will be happy to know that the same qualities are on display in Intermezzo.”—The New York Times

“Rooney has discovered her full literary prowess—the reward is transcendent. . . . On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had. I felt changed, and utterly the same, the way it feels to read Larkin, or Tolstoy; felt, that for the time spent reading Intermezzo, I had gone more deeply into the world, reattuned to its networked thrum of pleasures, miseries, worries, and erotics that I might already have been aware of—but dully. Sublime literature will do this for you.”—The Independent (UK)

A story about grief

A beautiful story about two brothers who are suffering with grief, following the death of their father