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Intermezzo: A Novel

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

Named a Best Book of the Year and a Critics
Pick by The New York Times
Named an Essential Read by The New Yorker
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, Financial Times, Vogue, The Guardian, Harper’s
Bazaar, Vox, The Times (UK), Apple Books, and more
A USA Today, People, and Associated Press Top 10 Book of the Year

One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024

One of Chicago Public Librarys Favorite 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.

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Published Sep 24, 2024

464 pages

Average rating: 6.61

450 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

jess.withbooks
Jun 05, 2025
8/10 stars
“Of course, he and his brother both wanted their lives to consist of winning all the time and never losing: this is presumably true of everyone. No one ever wants to lose. And yet for both Peter and Ivan, this particular feeling has perhaps been more important, more intense than for other people: the desire to win all the time, and also the naive youthful belief that it would be possible to live such a life, now soured by experience.”
Eilcoo1157
Apr 25, 2025
5/10 stars
Hard read- without proper punctuation I kept getting lost. There are, however, topics brought to light that deserve discussion.
Tracey Exton
Apr 22, 2025
3/10 stars
Really didn’t like it. Didn’t engage with the characters at all
Anonymous
Apr 02, 2025
10/10 stars
RAHHHH this was SO good
lulutripp
Mar 16, 2025
8/10 stars
This took a while to get into, and while I am not sure I liked it as much as Rooney's Normal People, I did wind up really feeling for these two brothers. I give it 4 stars for characterization - how distinctive each brother and his inner monologuing is.

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