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Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Literary fiction

Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

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Quick take

Everyone’s favorite modern Irish scribe Sally Rooney returns with a piercing ode to family, grief, love and friendship.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Romance

    Romance

  • Illustrated icon, 400

    400+ pages

  • Illustrated icon, Buzzy

    Buzzy

  • Illustrated icon, Siblings

    Siblings

Synopsis

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.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Intermezzo.

Intermezzo

1

Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent. On such occasions, one could almost come to regret one’s own social brilliance. Gives him the excuse, or gives him in any case someone at whom to look pleadingly between the mandatory handshakes. God love him. Nearly twenty-three now: Ivan the terrible. Difficult actually to believe the suit on him. Picked it up perhaps in some little damp-smelling second-hand shop for the local hospice, paid in cash, rode it home on his bicycle crumpled in a reusable plastic bag. Yes, that in fact would make sense of it, would bring into alignment the suit in its resplendent ugliness and the personality of the younger brother, ten years younger. Not without style in his own way. Certain kind of panache in his absolute disregard for the material world. Brains and beauty, an aunt said once. About them both. Or was it Ivan brains and Peter beauty. Thanks, I think. He crosses Watling Street now towards the apartment that is not an apartment, the house that is not a house, eleven or is it twelve days since the funeral, back in town. Back at work, such as it is. Or back anyway to Naomi’s place. And what will she be wearing when she answers the door. Slides his phone from his pocket into the palm of his hand as he reaches the front step, cool tactility of the screen as it lights under his fingers, typing. Outside. Evenings drawing in now and she’s back at her lectures, presumably. No reply but she sees the message, and then the predictable sequence, the so familiar and by now indirectly arousing sequence of sounds as behind the front door she comes up the old basement staircase and into the hall. Classical conditioning: how did it take so long to figure that out? Common sense. Not that. Everyday experience. The relationship of memory and feeling. The opening door.

Hello, Peter, she says.

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Why I love it

Sally Rooney is back! Like many of you, I’ve been obsessed with her writing since I first read Normal People. Her characters make me feel seen and understood and her stories delicately clarify parts of life that I so often find inexplicable. Intermezzo is no exception. This touching exploration of togetherness has everything I adore about Sally Rooney’s books, with a fresh twist! I think you’re gonna love it just as much as I did.

Peter and Ivan Koubek are brothers and polar opposites. Peter is an established lawyer in his thirties. Ivan is 22 and a geeky college grad who sports adult braces and a knack for chess. As Peter finds himself entranced with two romantic interests, Ivan falls deeply in love with an older woman. Clearly, the Koubek brothers’ lives are diverging—as is their relationship—but, after their father passes away, their shared grief initiates an inspired search for connection and meaning.

Curl up with Intermezzo and experience the pains of brotherhood and mourning alongside the joys of love and life. As usual, Sally Rooney pulls at your heartstrings until they break in this masterful new novel. Don’t worry, we can cry together…

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Member ratings (45)

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New and recent add-ons
View all
Intermezzo
The Stone Witch of Florence
What Does It Feel Like?
The Last One at the Wedding
The Book of George
We Solve Murders
The Bog Wife
Here One Moment
The Night We Lost Him
The Crimson Crown
Someone in the Attic
Middle of the Night
A Sorceress Comes to Call
Four Weekends and a Funeral
The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love
The Seventh Veil of Salome
Leather & Lark
Hum
The Life Impossible
Vilest Things
The Love of My Afterlife
Home Cooking