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Intermezzo

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About this listen

THE GLOBAL NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER

OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD

'I read it in a state of rapture.' SUNDAY TIMES
'A tender, funny page-turner.' OBSERVER
'Come for the romance, stay for the meaning of life.' IRISH TIMES
'A breathtakingly intimate look at love and desire in its many different forms.' RED

From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family.

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.

Sally Rooney's book Intermezzo was a bestseller w/c 30/09/2024

©2024 Sally Rooney (P)2024 Faber & Faber
Best of 2024 Editors Select Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature Heartfelt Grief

Editorial Review

Sally Rooney raises her game
We may not be getting bucket hats this time, but a new Sally Rooney novel is still an EVENT. And Intermezzo is much more than a must-have accessory, though you’ll see it everywhere this fall. If you’ve been pining for Sally’s liquid sentences and diamond insights, here they are, this time in a tale of two brothers: Peter, a dashing early-thirtysomething who “goes along the surface of life very smoothly” according to Ivan, younger by a decade, a neurodiverse chess prodigy a bit past his prime – both of them navigating romances while facing the recent death of their father. I’m inhaling the vivid scenes and blasé bombshells – “Plain, unappealing people are by no means exempt from the experience of strong passions,” muses Ivan, for one. This is also a first-time departure from Rooney’s signature narrator, Aoife McMahon. I will always love Aoife, but man, Éanna Hardwicke, who you know as Rob from TV’s Normal People, is the perfect voice for this novel: intelligent, charismatic and (yes!) demurely sexy as only Irish men know how. Well played, all around. — Kat J., Audible Editor

All stars
Most relevant
Sally Rooney's writing in this book is levels up ahead of the writing in some of her previous books (Normal People, Conversations with Friends). The amount of complex emotions showcased in this book and their depth was simply stunning in execution. I found myself pausing the audiobook to write down quotes from the book constantly. Some examples of great quotes in this book:

"It is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one's life on earth while engaged in a never-ending struggle to pay rent than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway."

"The difference between truth and lying is complicated. You think you're fitting language onto the world in a certain way like a child fitting the right-shaped toy into the right-shaped slot but you realize that it's a false picture. Language doesn't fit onto reality like a toy fitting into a slot."

"The person that's gone has no reality except in our thoughts and once they're gone from our thoughts then they're actually gone."

"That he's come to love her such an absurd thing, like a staged fight where it turns out the knives are real."

Both Peter and Ivan's POVs are very interesting, seeing the way they each cope with grief after losing their father and how each perceives the other was very interesting.

I enjoyed Peter's POV much more, it felt more meaningful. It was however much tougher to get into than Ivan's POV. The writing style for the two POVs is quite different and Peter's style of narration was trickier to follow at first but as the story unfolds I found myself wishing the Ivan chapters would go faster so I could go back to seeing Peter's POV. All in all an amazing book!

Also, the audiobook performance is so good! I could tell instantly if it was a Peter chapter or an Ivan chapter from the first 2 words.

Easily one of my favorite books ever!

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the story floored me really, I found the story so compelling, the little snapshot of time following a bereavement. it was such a beautiful story and the narrator was an excellent choice.

intelligent prose

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The pace was slow, and I found that I really had to tune in with this one. Sally Rooney's usual writing style was evident, but I didn't feel as absorbed throughout as I did with Conversations With Friends and Beautiful World, Where Are You. I hope to gain more by listening again, although it is quite long.

Enjoyed overall

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I was pleasantly surprised by the book, my first Sally Rooney work. I liked watching the development of the characters and the conflicts and misunderstandings. The dialog was complex yet needed by the characters to dig the various holes they needed to isolate themselves.
it had the bizarreness we often see with friends,family and neighbours who often seem to burrow deep away from the light of their love for others.

the wonder of flawed lives

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Absolutely loved this reading of Rooney’s latest novel. Even the more experimental passages are rendered accessible.

Beautiful prose, beautifully read

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