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.
“Wise, resonant and witty . . . There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea . . . Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading . . . Intermezzo wears its heart on its sleeve.”
―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“The formal experiments are never idle but always at the service of a desire for emotional precision, for a more satisfactory rendering of the boundless complexity of the inner life . . . It is no small part of Rooney’s achievement in her latest novel that she portrays physical desire with tact and tenderness, without giving in to soft-focus sentimentalism . . . This bold, adventurous and captivating novel is a major addition to a body of work that never fails to surprise and engage.”
―Michael Cronin, The Irish Times
“Intermezzo is exquisite . . . It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s oceanic sentences, the waters go deep.”
―Constance Grady, Vox
“Intermezzo is perfect―truly wonderful―a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements . . . She leans fully into her gifts here: more characters, more complication, ‘more life,’ as Margaret thinks . . . Is there a better novelist at work right now?”
―Anthony Cummins, The Observer
“That divide between what you believe and how you behave is one of the great themes of Intermezzo . . . This is new and deeper territory for Rooney . . . Intermezzo is in many ways a more truthful book . . . The work of an artist who is continually trying out new techniques and continually growing.”
―Laura Miller, Slate
“[Rooney’s] most mature and moving book to date . . . I read it in a state of rapture―and relief. By rediscovering what the one thing the novel uniquely excels at―inwardness―Rooney shows she can tune into her characters’ thoughts and catch them in the act of realising important things about themselves. Her work is much better for it.”
―Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times
“Something big has shifted here . . . [Rooney] has also set out to probe something deeper and more enduring, more universally human: grief itself . . . The way she supplies tidy closure, even as she subverts it, is a testament to her skill as a novelist.”
―Amy Weiss-Meyer, The Atlantic
“Intermezzo reaffirms Rooney’s ability to capture the thrill and desperation of blooming romance, and to portray a microcosm of human existence with precision and insight.”
―Michelle Cyca, The Globe and Mail
“On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had. I felt changed, and utterly the same, the way it feels to read Larkin, or Tolstoy; felt, that for the time spent reading Intermezzo, I had gone more deeply into the world, reattuned to its networked thrum of pleasures, miseries, worries, and erotics that I might already have been aware of―but dully . . . We see Sally Rooney discovering the full potential of her prowess: to attend finely to the world around her, to find love in its every complexity having done so, to offer those findings sincerely to others.”
―Jo Hamya, The Independent
“I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product, one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence, and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves . . . In recent years, Rooney has flirted with the idea that the novel, by asking us to love fictional people that will ‘never love us in return,’ provides readers with a unique opportunity to practice a kind of love for one’s fellow man.”
―Andrea Long Chu, New York
“Her gifts are clear: writing realistic dialogue and creating believable characters; narrative economy and instinctive pacing; capturing the way we live as it moves and changes; depicting emotion. She has a particularly deft sense of the writer’s role in a political landscape . . . Rooney’s novels stand for the notion that ordinary people should also be allowed the tumults and comforts of an emotional life, along with a sense that their existence is important because it is precious to the people they love.”
―Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books
“On the one hand, Intermezzo is a knotted, romantic melodrama that offers extensive insight into the rattled neuroses and intimate desires of its characters along with a substantial array of steamy love scenes. On the other hand, it’s a layered book about the displacement of grief and the noise of modern life. In both respects, Rooney skillfully keeps her finger on the pulse of characters . . . Intermezzo is studded with shimmering moments of pastoral stillness.”
―Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston Globe
“[Rooney] examines modern love in all its glory and friction . . . Rooney's pared-back and realistic style has also evolved, with precise dialogues dipping into vivid, internal monologues.”
―Clara Lalanne, Barron’s
“For all the griefs and regrets in [Intermezzo], all the misreadings and mistakes, as the characters try to figure out what they feel, we never lose sight of their capacity for love. If Rooney’s work has a guiding belief, I think it’s something such as this: no one is ever truly alone. Some might see that as obvious, a truism. Others would call it a reason to live.”
―Cal Revely-Calder, The Telegraph
“Mature and profound, Intermezzo feels like a culmination of everything she has done before . . . A melancholic marvel; what is easily her best novel yet.”
―Anna Bonet, iNews
“[Rooney’s] most ambitious book yet, with a notable change in style . . . Though [Intermezzo] circles Rooney’s familiar themes―sex and romance, female illness, former whiz kids facing adult irrelevance―the work is deeper and more tender.”
―Erin Somers, Air Mail
“Intermezzo is an accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon. It’s also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger.”
―Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
“Intermezzo sees Rooney return to exceptional form with a novel as clever as her 2017 debut Conversations with Friends, and as engrossing as its 2018 follow-up Normal People . . . Love, as Rooney depicts it here, is a moral proposition, complete with obligations for solicitude and responsibility.”
―Shahidha Bari, Financial Times
“Intermezzo is scattered with the little gifts of psychological and emotional observation that are the most cherishable aspects of Rooney’s talent.”
―James Marriott, The Times
“Fascinating and delicate . . . The sheer amount of human relationships and dynamics, like in all of her previous novels, gives a wide range of conversations and thoughtful dialogues. Readers will want to read it again and again to catch every sly nuance.”
―Abby Sliva, The Minnesota Star Tribune
“Come for the romance; stay for the meaning of life, of which, of course, love is a fundamental part.”
―Martin Doyle, The Irish Times
“The arrival of a new Sally Rooney novel is always cause for celebration; there is simply no other novelist chronicling the early adulthood of disaffected youth in the 21st century with more care and compassion . . . In Intermezzo she broadens her scope and diverts from the casually complex conversational tone . . . The book rewards the effort.”
―Chloe Schama, Vogue
“Stylistically daring, emotionally explosive, and endlessly wise, this is Rooney’s best work yet.”
―Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily (Best of Fall)
“[Intermezzo] 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.”
―Booklist (starred review)
“Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement . . . The novel’s deliberate pacing veers from the propulsiveness of Normal Peopleand 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 . . . Even the author’s skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel’s forceful currents of feeling.”
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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 . . . The characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real . . . Her grandmaster status remains intact.”
―Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Conversations with Friends; Normal People; and Beautiful World, Where Are You. She also contributed to the writing and production of the Hulu/BBC television adaptation of Normal People.
