Intermezzo

Peter Koubek is a successful Dublin lawyer in his thirties, grieving his father and stretched between two women: his long-term girlfriend Sylvia, whose chronic pain has changed everything between them, and Naomi, who is twenty-three and uncomplicated in ways Sylvia no longer is. Ivan Koubek is twenty-two, a chess prodigy, and convinced he is too strange and too intense to be loved — until he meets Margaret, a forty-year-old recently divorced woman who surprises him entirely.

Two brothers. Two very different love stories. One shared grief at the centre of it all. Told with the acute emotional intelligence that has made Sally Rooney one of the defining writers of her generation, Intermezzo is her most mature and moving novel yet — a book about how people reach for each other in the dark, and how love, even complicated love, can hold us together.

Global #1 bestseller. A Best Book of 2024 in the Guardian, The Times, Sunday Times, and The Observer.