Intermezzo: A Novel

"[B]rilliant narration by the actor Éanna Hardwicke."-Financial Times

"Éanna Hardwicke's narration highlights the rich emotionality of Rooney's newest novel. Hardwicke's smooth voice shifts to capture every mood--becoming desperately angry, bitter, and frantic yet also achingly tender, patient, and loving--as he performs a story of two grieving brothers."-AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)

This program is read by actor Éanna Hardwicke, known for his role in Hulu's Normal People.

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family-but especially love-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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

1144982832
Intermezzo: A Novel

"[B]rilliant narration by the actor Éanna Hardwicke."-Financial Times

"Éanna Hardwicke's narration highlights the rich emotionality of Rooney's newest novel. Hardwicke's smooth voice shifts to capture every mood--becoming desperately angry, bitter, and frantic yet also achingly tender, patient, and loving--as he performs a story of two grieving brothers."-AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)

This program is read by actor Éanna Hardwicke, known for his role in Hulu's Normal People.

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family-but especially love-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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Intermezzo: A Novel

Intermezzo: A Novel

by Sally Rooney

Narrated by Éanna Hardwicke

Unabridged — 16 hours, 29 minutes

Intermezzo: A Novel

Intermezzo: A Novel

by Sally Rooney

Narrated by Éanna Hardwicke

Unabridged — 16 hours, 29 minutes

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We all caught the Sally Rooney bug with her stunning debut Conversations with Friends — now we’re ready to fall in love all over again. Intermezzo absolutely soars with complicated relationships (romantic and familial) and the signature writing we can’t get enough of from a literary icon.

"[B]rilliant narration by the actor Éanna Hardwicke."-Financial Times

"Éanna Hardwicke's narration highlights the rich emotionality of Rooney's newest novel. Hardwicke's smooth voice shifts to capture every mood--becoming desperately angry, bitter, and frantic yet also achingly tender, patient, and loving--as he performs a story of two grieving brothers."-AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)

This program is read by actor Éanna Hardwicke, known for his role in Hulu's Normal People.

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family-but especially love-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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.


Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/22/2024

Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement (after Beautiful World, Where Are You). After their father dies, brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek drift further apart. Peter, 32, is a depressed Dublin lawyer torn between his college girlfriend, Sylvia, who broke up with him with after she suffered a disabling accident six years earlier, and 23-year-old Naomi, a sometime sex worker. Ivan, 22, is a socially inept pro chess player whose wunderkind status is in doubt when he meets and falls for 36-year-old near-divorcée Margaret at a tournament. Peter’s reflexive disapproval of the age gap in Ivan and Margaret’s relationship causes a permanent rift, and Rooney crosscuts between their perspectives as they ruminate on their father’s death and their complicated romances. 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. Underlining Peter’s rudderlessness, she writes, “Lamplight. Walking her to the library under the trees. Live again one day of that life and die. Cold wind in his eyes stinging like tears. Woman much missed.” Moreover, her focus on Peter and Ivan’s complicated fraternal bond pays enormous dividends. Even the author’s skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel’s forceful currents of feeling. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

"The Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke narrates, making deft work of Rooney’s stylized prose and drawing a smart contrast between Peter’s unhappy conceitedness and Ivan’s youthful insecurities."—The Guardian

“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)

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 . . . The characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real . . . Her grandmaster status remains intact.”

Kirkus Reviews

Library Journal

★ 12/20/2024

Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You) once again delivers her signature spin on literary fiction with another story of beautiful eccentrics making connections that are flawed and fraught, yet luminous. Her latest novel will appeal to readers of her previous books and viewers of the TV adaptation of Normal People, with its striking moments of quiet passion, inner struggles, and small but life-altering moments. This novel is about brothers Peter, a thirtysomething lawyer, and Ivan, a 22-year-old competitive chess player. Their father has died, and they are grieving him in different ways. Peter chooses to self-medicate, while Ivan, usually a loner, meets an older woman during the early weeks of his mourning period, and their lives quickly intertwine. VERDICT Rooney's at her best between the acts, as in the intermezzo moments or pauses between bold movements. Readers will find themselves tearfully applauding for the small victories, the little defeats, and the silences between characters in this lovely story of complicated people finding, and often losing, each other in times of pain.—Emily Bowles

Kirkus Reviews

2024-07-04
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. 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. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940191810683
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Publication date: 09/24/2024
Edition description: Unabridged
Sales rank: 200,203
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