INTERMEZZO

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