Read With Us

Read With Us Selection
Fall 2024

Intermezzo
by Sally Rooney

454 pages

Published September 24, 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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“The melodrama is perhaps the point … Rooney seems prepared to grant her characters a slightly off-kilter yet still harmonious ending, this time against a backdrop of personal grief and family strife … The way she supplies tidy closure, even as she subverts it, is a testament to her skill as a novelist.”
—Amy Weiss-Meyer, The Atlantic

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“What if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

Brief Synopsis

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

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.

Information About the Author

Photo by Kalpesh Lathigra

(from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Macmillan Publishers)

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