Hardback: 437 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction, Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Romance.
Publisher: 2024 by Faber and Faber
Source: Tywyn Library
First Sentences: Didn't seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.
Review Quote: 'Intermezzo is perfect ... Is there a better novelist at work right now?' Observer
Favourite Quote: “Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”
Literary Awards: British Book Award Nominee for Fiction (2025), Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) Nominee for International Book (2025), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2024), The Rooster -- The Morning News Tournament of Books Nominee for Longlist (2025), She Reads Best of Award Nominee for Book of the Year and Literary Fiction (2024), Barnes & Noble Book of the Year Award Nominee (2024)
Setting: Dublin, Ireland.
My Opinion:
The third book I have read by this Irish author and each one has been a 5* literary treat.
'Intermezzo' is an emotionally moving story of two brothers whose father has recently died leaving them both grieving in different ways and causing an estrangement between them. Actually they have never been that close anyway. Peter the much older sibling is struggling as his relationship with the love of his life is a difficult one and he finds himself turning to a much younger woman for consolation. Ironic as at the same time he is overtly critical of his brother Ivan for being romantically involved with an older woman. The character building and exploration of the dynamics between the brothers and the women in their lives tie this complex novel together perfectly.
For me this was another well-crafted contemporary relationship story from Sally Rooney, highly recommended.
Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:
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.
Previous Review: Beautiful World Where Are You
Author Profile:
Courtesy of Goodreads Profile
SALLY ROONEY was born in County Mayo in the west of Ireland in 1991. She now lives in Dublin. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and The London Review of Books. Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017, she is the author of Conversations with Friends and the editor of the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly.
Photograph and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites.
Amazon Author Page. Goodreads Profile.