Intermezzo: A Novel [Paperback]

AN INSTANTNEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER |A National Indie Bestseller

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

Named a Best Book of the Year and a CriticsPick byThe New York Times|Named an Essential Read byTheNew Yorker| Named a Best Book of the Year byTheWashington Post,Time,Financial Times,Vogue,The Guardian,HarpersBazaar,Vox,The Times(UK), Apple Books, and more |AUSA Today,People, and Associated Press Top 10 Book of the Year |One of Barack Obamas favorite books of 2024 |One of Chicago Public Librarys Favorite Books of the Year

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and familybut especially lovefrom 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 thirtiessuccessful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their fathers death, hes medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different womenhis 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 interludea period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.