Intermezzo : a novel / Sally Rooney.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller
Short-listed for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year
Finalist for the Barnes and Noble Book of the Year
One of Publishers Weekly 's Best 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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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.)

Booklist Review

Brothers Peter and Ivan have just lost their father, the more devoted of their divorced parents. Ivan, 22, still in braces, meets the much-older Margaret at a chess event in which he was invited to play against all the members of a community chess club simultaneously, and won every game. Ivan is shy at first, and Margaret is nearly disgusted with herself for her attraction to him, but there's no denying their instant connection. A decade Ivan's senior, Peter, a self-medicating, bleeding-heart sort of Dublin lawyer, chides Ivan for falling for a woman who couldn't possibly be serious about him, thoughtlessly omitting from the discussion his own infatuation with Naomi, who's Ivan's age. This crisscross also brings in Sylvia, Peter's all-encompassing flame, practically a member of the family, who, following a terrible accident, can't fully be with him. Rooney's (Beautiful World, Where Are You, 2022) fourth novel might be her best yet: a tale of depth and grand sweep, an understated study of characters caught circling the margin of some great and unknown thing, and a diversion of pure enjoyment, too. Rooney's title tells us these brothers, in their love and fury for one another, are at an in-between moment, as she carefully, brilliantly writes them out of it.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Irish writer Rooney's U.S. following grows book by book, thanks, in part, to her earlier novels' TV adaptations.

Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Spanish Review

De Sally Rooney se n'ha dit: The Guardian -- «El fenomen literari de la dècada.» El País -- «Literatura en majúscules.» Zadie Smith -- «M'encanta Sally Rooney. Té molts imitadors, però n'hi ha molt pocs que s'acostin al seu nivell, i encara menys crítics que entenguin què hi passa, realment, a les seves novel·les. Una intel·ligència excepcional.» The Times -- «Rooney ha estat considerada la veu de la seva generació (i probablement és així), però el seu talent va molt més enllà. El seu do per plasmar les persones amb tota la seva vanitat i les seves virtuts puntuals la col·loquen en la magnífica tradició d'esmolada observació social que es remunta fins a Jane Austen.» Albert Forns, Ara Llegim -- «Sally Rooney és especialment brillant recreant la intimitat entre els joves, tota aquesta constel·lació de carícies i sensacions, de converses i, esclar, d'uns silencis i sobreentesos que semblen de Harold Pinter.» Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, La Vanguardia -- «Rooney confirma totes les capacitats que ja va exhibir al seu debut. Un ull ben entrenat per veure les subtileses socials, un enginy hàbil per al diàleg [...] i un respecte cap a la seva pròpia història i els seus personatges, que frenen qualsevol ambició que pugui tenir i té d'escriure epopeies amb simbolisme generacional.» Marina Porras, Catalunya Diari -- «Rooney és una escriptora interessant per ella mateixa però ho és més com a fenomen, perquè es troba al nucli dels problemes que marquen el nostre temps.» Irene Pujadas, La Lectora -- «Té un estil concís i analític, intel·ligent, domina els diàlegs i sap fer parlar els seus personatges a través de gestos i accions.» Marta Grau, Núvol -- «Rooney ensenya la poteta de les seves obsessions: les diferències de classe, les conseqüències del capitalisme en la salut mental i l'acceptació que ofereix "ser normal".» The New York Times Book Review -- «Les novel·les de Rooney tenen l'inusual poder de fer allò que sol fer la literatura realista: mostrar com pensen i actuen en privat els nostres coetanis, i permetre veure'ns reflectits en els seus dilemes. Hi ha molt pocs escriptors contemporanis que puguin aconseguir el que fa Rooney amb la seva escriptura i els seus personatges.» The Washington Post -- «L'habilitat de Rooney per submergir-se a fons en els detalls minuciosos de les emocions dels seus personatges i, alhora, mantenir la imatge desarrelada i desenfadada de l'era d'Instagram, reflecteix la preocupació actual per l'aparença per sobre de la vulnerabilitat. Aquí, joventut, amor i covardia s'entrellacen inevitablement, destil·lats en una novel·la que reclama ser llegida compulsivament, d'una tirada.» Esquire -- «Etiquetar Rooney com una escriptora millennial és subestimar els dons prodigiosos que té: la deliciosa agudesa psicològica que fa que les seves novel·les espetarreguin i l'habilitat per explorar la influència dels sistemes sociopolítics sobre els individus que, alternativament, pateixen i es desenvolupen suportant-ne el pes.» Vogue -- «Rooney ha inventat una sensibilitat que és només seva: alegre i aguda, lliure d'artificis però que desborda saviesa i intensitat.»