Intermezzo
By Sally Rooney

THE GLOBAL #1 BESTSELLERANand IRISH TIMESand TOP 100 IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURYA BEST BOOK OF 2024 IN THEand GUARDIAN, TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, IRISH TIMES, LONDON STANDARD, INDEPENDENT, OBSERVER, NEW STATESMAN, iNEWS, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, THE SKINNY, CITY AM, DAILY MAIL,and ANDand THE CONVERSATION'I read it in a state of rapture.'and SUNDAY TIMES'A tender, funny page-turner.'and OBSERVER'Come for the romance, stay for the meaning of life.'and IRISH TIMES'A breathtakingly intimate look at love and desire in its many different forms.'and REDFrom the author of the multimillion-copy bestsellerand Normal People,and an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family.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.