Intermezzo by Sally Rooney @FaberBooks #Intermezzo #SallyRooney #Out24Sept24

Good morning everyone and happy Monday. I’m excited to share my review of the fantastic Intermezzo by Sally Rooney today.

Intermezzo is out tomorrow and at Rossiter Books we are opening early for people who can’t wait to get their hands on a copy. We (and other independent bookstores) have some fantastic tote bags and other goodies to give away with the book as well as some yummy pastries. I’m actually working tomorrow so if you are local come and see us from 8am!

Book Synopsis :

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.

My Review:

Intermezzo is a beautifully written, compelling read about how complex relationships can be and the importance of human connection. It’s going to be a difficult book to review as I want to do the book justice but not give anything away at the same time.

The story follows two brothers; Ivan a competitive chess player and Peter a lawyer. Out of the two brothers I much preferred Ivan who seemed gentler and less conceited than his brother which endeared himself to me instantly. My opinion of Peter did change as the book went on as I understood more about his life and everything that he was dealing with. It was very interesting to follow the brothers as they tried to deal with their grief for their father whilst keeping all the other different sections of their life together at the same time.

I thought this book started off slowly while the author sets the scene but quickly becomes very absorbing. The characters seemed so vivid that I felt like I really got to know them and cared about what happened to them as if they were actual friends. As expected the author weaves some very current topics into her writing which I found interesting to explore alongside the characters. Intermezzo was one of those books that I raced through as I was so enjoying but then tried to ration out the last few pages as I really didn’t want it to end.

Huge thanks to Mel from Faber for sending me a copy to review.

About The Author:

SALLY ROONEY was born in the west of Ireland in 1991. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and The London Review of Books. Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017, she is the author of Conversations with Friends and the editor of the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly.