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Sign up todayIntermezzo
A Novel
Narrator
Éanna Hardwicke
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Length
16 hours 29 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“Here is a fascinatingly cerebral read with a highly unpredictable plot! Two brothers, (one an extrovert that things come to easily and the younger one who is a smart, chess playing "on the spectrum" introvert) face parallel challenges with women and their family. Filled with the exceptionally moody inner thoughts of both brothers and the very different yet engaging women they woo. Rooney's writing style is totally intriguing. ”
— Patience • Underground Books
Bookseller recommendation
“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
Bookseller recommendation
“As a major Sally Rooney fan, I couldn’t wait to read this one, and was very excited that it’s much longer than Normal People and Conversations With Friends so I could spend as much time as possible with her writing. Intermezzo explores the lives of two brothers who are about 10 years apart. Because the brothers are at very different stages of their lives, the book explores a vast number of themes. Since it is Salley Rooney, though, much of the novel dives deep into the romantic relationships of the brothers, both navigating what it means to be in love and how that can look very different depending on who it is that you love. In all her books, Sally Rooney does such a beautiful job of expressing one's inner thoughts in relationships, even those thoughts we want no one else to hear or know about, but through her writing, I feel less alone in having those thoughts. I especially loved how this book had an emphasis on the ever-changing relationship between siblings, as someone who has siblings myself. Full disclosure: I sobbed as I finished this book, but in the best possible way! ”
— Lark • Off the Beaten Path
Bookseller recommendation
“Two brothers, Ivan and Peter, navigate their relationships with each other and the women in their lives in the wake of their father's death. In their grief, the pair watch as the normal forms of their lives fall apart and they try their best to make sense of the wreckage. Sally Rooney does what she does best: sets up a wealth of interestingly and painfully human characters like pieces on a chessboard and watches one by one as they fall and pick themselves back up. The kind of book that makes learning chess worth it.”
— Will • Quail Ridge Books
"[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.
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.
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Reviews
Advance Praise
“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