Intermezzo: A Novel

by Sally Rooney

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.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller

Short-listed for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year | Nominated for the DUBLIN Literary Award

Named a Best Book of the Year and a Critics’ Pick by The New York Times | Named an Essential Read by The New Yorker | Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, Financial Times, Vogue, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, The Times (UK), Apple Books, and more | A USA Today, People, and Associated Press Top 10 Book of the Year | One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024 | One of Chicago Public Library’s Favorite Books of the Year

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374602635
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/24/2024
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Beautiful World, Where Are You; Conversations with Friends; and Normal People. She also contributed to the writing and production of the Hulu/BBC television adaptation of Normal People.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

2026 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - Nominee, Nominated
2024 Washington Post Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 CPL: Chicago Public Library Best of the Best, Long-listed
2024 NPR Best Book of the Year, Long-listed
2024 Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 Audible.com Best of the Year, Long-listed
2024 The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2024 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, Long-listed