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Intermezzo (Hardback)
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
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From the author of the bestseller Normal People.
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.
Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements … Is there a better novelist at work right now?
Her most mature and moving book to date … By the final pages my eyes were red and swollen. I read it in a state of rapture.
Rooney has discovered her full literary prowess … [I] felt that for the time spent reading Intermezzo, I had gone more deeply into the world … Sublime literature will do that for you.
If a perfect Sally Rooney novel exists, this might just be it … Her best novel yet.
Rooney’s best book yet … A complex, dark and philosophical read. It’s a marvel.
Reading her piercing descriptions of passion, heartache, drunkenness or rage, you stop and wonder, how did she know that?
Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You. She was the winner of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. Normal People (‘the literary phenomenon of the decade’, Guardian) was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019, won the Costa Novel of the Year 2018…
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