Intermezzo: A Novel

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.

SALLY ROONEY is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You.

ISBN: 9780735281820
Format: Hardback
Pages: 448
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: September 24, 2024

“With her fourth novel, 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)

“Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement. . . . 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. . . . Even the author’s skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel’s forceful currents of feeling.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Sally Rooney's plangent, philosophical fourth novel reflects her growing literary and emotional maturity, while continuing her forensic dissection of intimacy, connection and desire. . . . This lyrical story of fraternal friction, emotional crisis and unexpected love interrogates the significance of romantic age gaps and relationship norms against a backdrop of societal judgement, overturning readers' expectations alongside those of its characters.” —The Bookseller

“Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. . . . [T]he pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real. . . . [A] clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The most talked-about author of her generation returns with a hotly awaited fourth book. . . . With a Joycean tang to the prose, it continues the deepening of her style since the crystalline insouciance of her 2017 debut Conversations with Friends.”