Intermezzo is an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Out in South Africa in September 2024 from Jonathan Ball Publishers.

Publisher Alex Bowler says:

‘Intermezzo is a story of brothers and lovers, of familial and romantic intimacies, of relationships that don’t quite fit the conventional structures. After three miraculous books, Sally Rooney’s millions of readers will recognise the beauty and insight, the pain and hope that radiates from this new novel. But it marks an exquisite advance, too, in the work of a writer who seems so attuned to our lives, our hearts and our times.’

About the book

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.

About the author

Sally Rooney is the author of Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You. All three of her novels have been international bestsellers, and her work is translated into over 40 languages. Her first two novels have been adapted as television series for the BBC. In 2022, TIME magazine named her among the 100 most influential people in global culture. She lives and works in County Mayo, Ireland, where she was born.

Categories Fiction International

Tags Intermezzo Jonathan Ball Publishers New books New releases Sally Rooney