A story of grief, estrangement and the complexities of brotherhood. With a dual POV that gives us the blunt and often cold view of the older brother, coupled with the anxiety riddled rambling of the younger - it's obvious these two are a mess from the very first page. Rooney truly has a talent for so accurately depicting the mundanity of every day life, and yet gripping you the whole way through.
— Merrell
Beautiful and precise book, amazing portrait of sibling-hood and the restructuring of a bereaved family. Rooney is nothing if not wise, fastidious, brave. She wrote the dog so well! The Sally Rooney Industrial Complex is hard for me to take & I try to abstain from the hype machine, but will never let it sour the love and satisfaction I get from reading her work.
— Darcie
Some books live rent free in your head, some characters live rent free in your head, but in this new Rooney, you live rent free in the character's minds. This is a *chef's kiss* romantic stream of consciousness-style novel that left me feeling very tender and taken care of <3
— Swati
Rooney is my dream writer. She gets me and siblings and love and relationships. She knows time and she knows rain and she influenced my life while I was reading this. I enjoyed every day that I spent with these brothers in their sad grieving world. I can't wait to reread and meet them again.
— Camille
I also read Intermezzo. I also loved Intermezzo. If you've read Rooney, you'll recognize her familiar droll, very complicated characters but you'll also encounter a newish experimentation in writing style and, in my opinion, a new softness. Grief is both a monster and a gift. It can destroy. But the deep love that presupposes it can also birth beautiful new life. I enjoyed the journey.
— Genay
A story of familial and romantic love masterfully told in the form of Rooney's intelligent, sarcastic and unforgiving narration; lyrical yet conversational. More than ever Rooney encourages, even predicts a future in which humans are willing to give unconventional ways of loving each other a chance, if only because our lives are fleeting, and time for loving must not be wasted. A modern classic.
— Kate P
“Rooney’s dazzling masterpiece explores the hidden depths of our relationships to one another. Peter and Ivan grieve the recent loss of their father. Never close, they struggle to avoid estrangement while navigating their very different lives.”
— Cody Morrison, Square Books, Oxford, MS
"[B]rilliant narration by the actor Éanna Hardwicke."—Financial Times
"Éanna Hardwicke's narration highlights the rich emotionality of Rooney's newest novel. Hardwicke's smooth voice shifts to capture every mood--becoming desperately angry, bitter, and frantic yet also achingly tender, patient, and loving--as he performs a story of two grieving brothers."—AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)
This program is read by actor Éanna Hardwicke, known for his role in Hulu's Normal People.
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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
"The Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke narrates, making deft work of Rooney’s stylized prose and drawing a smart contrast between Peter’s unhappy conceitedness and Ivan’s youthful insecurities."—The Guardian
“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