Intermezzo - by Sally Rooney (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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 Library's 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.

Review Quotes

"There is so much relief . . . in turning to a Sally Rooney novel: taking the weight of her elegant, deeply felt sentences; feeling how much control she has over the words she's using; how strongly she believes that they should be as beautiful as she can make them. At last, the chance to relax in the presence of someone who knows what she's doing."
--Constance Grady, Vox

"Ms. Rooney has achieved a neat trick: She is considered the trendiest of novelists, though she writes in a traditional comic form . . . Her characters are distinct individuals whose names and actions are easy to recall, even years after reading the books."
--B. D. McClay, Wall Street Journal

"The depths Rooney plumbs are idiosyncratically hers. In Intermezzo, Rooney brilliantly and hypnotically creates a universe parallel to the worlds she has created in three previous novels."
--Michael Pearson, New York Journal of Books

"On a construction level, it's Sally Rooney at her finest and most controlled . . . To discount the recurrence of certain themes and characterizations across her novels as unoriginal is to overlook the profundity of this novel . . . Again and again, Rooney's novels pose questions about what love is and how it shapes our lives . . . If Intermezzo is any indication, the author's literary finesse grows with each new novel."
--Cait O'Neill, Chicago Review of Books

"Rooney zooms in on these brothers with prose that is precise and rhythmic, her long paragraphs transmitting the winding nature of their inner worlds, how thoughts repeat and morph and collide . . . It's simple and yet complex; meticulous but alive; funny but deeply sad. It's Sally Rooney's best novel yet."
--Mari Cohen, Jewish Currents

"There are moments of real poignancy and the two men's hurt and grief, close to the surface, is often painful to read . . . This feels like a more mature novel--and in my opinion, [Rooney's] best yet. There's more introspection here, more vulnerability from the characters, and this allows a greater connection . . . Tender and true."
--Joanne Finney, Good Housekeeping

"Rooney proves that she can cover more ground than what the literary world expects from her . . . Intermezzo is a powerful rejoinder to Rooney's skeptics."
--Tisya Mavuram, The American Prospect

"Intermezzo, [Rooney's] fourth novel, is her most fully developed and moving yet . . . Intermezzo propels you to its well-earned, moving climax with nary a false move."
--Heller McAlpin, NPR

"Kaleidoscopically beautiful and intimately human . . . To read a Sally Rooney novel is to grip humanity in the palm of your hand, and Intermezzo is no different."
--Clare Mulroy, USA Today

"Figuring out how to coexist, perhaps even how to love each other, will be the primary challenge [Peter and Ivan] face in Intermezzo. Their relationship is a microcosm of the novel's interest in learning to live with difference--not just the kind that exists between individuals but also the warring factions that exist within each of them. And, of course, the most fundamental difference of all: that of life versus death."
--Jess Bergman, The Nation

"In her astutely intimate style, Rooney wades through the convoluted emotions that follow tragedy: certainly heartache, but also relief and longing, guilt and joy, all on the cusp of transformation . . . She teases out near-ruptured emotions never fully felt by the conscience, untethering them from reality for our voyeuristic pleasure . . . In the tense, messy contradictions of communal grief, Rooney weaves together beautiful whole cloth."
--Curtis Yee, Associated Press

"What's fascinating about Rooney's more recent attempts is how attuned she is to every social tightrope that constrains what we might have imagined would be free adulthood . . . There's something brilliant and refreshing in Rooney's choice to follow the private love affairs of two siblings once so closely connected . . . It's a pleasure, this time, to get under the skin and into the compassionate private realities of these brothers who misperceive each other as villains."
--Lillian Fishman, The Washington Post

"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 People and 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