Intermezzo cover art

Intermezzo

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Intermezzo

By: Sally Rooney
Narrated by: Éanna Hardwicke
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About this listen

THE GLOBAL NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER

'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

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

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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
It took me a little longer to get into this, compared to previous Sally Rooney books, but I was drawn in so deep I felt I was living it.
The writing is so focused and detailed and yet so effortless and natural that each nuance, every thought and emotion is perfectly realised.
Sad and beautiful, I didn’t want it to end.

Forensic exploration of grief

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Honestly loved this, Cried continuously. Read the book and immediately downloaded the audiobook so I could experience it again. The performance was pitch perfect.

I struggled with the first chapter initially trying to get used to the style and pacing.

This is a story about two brothers who would deem themselves opposites but fundamentally are both the same. The way Rooney writes about love, grief and loneliness floored me, she has so much empathy for her characters and the human experience. Definitely her saddest and best book to date.

Unputdownable

loved loved loved this book

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Disliked nothing, enjoyed getting to understand the characters and the in depth analysis of their feelings

The family misunderstandings, hit a nerve

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I have never listened to s book that so instantly sent me to sleep. The narration was so flat, so lifeless that it was like a stage curtain descending whenever the reader started, sleep overtook me. The story, dull as dishwater, just didn't have a single hook to keep me listening. Don't know how anyone enjoyed it.

Snorefest

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It’s a good book, and it’s very well performed and written. It all feels very ‘real’, and it’s gripping without all that much happening. It feels very Sally Rooney - if you’ve read or seen Normal People then you’ll recognise the tone - so you might find you need to be in a particular mood or headspace to listen. Again like Normal People, even despite the depth of the story and the characters, it left me wanting more, feeling “surely you can’t just leave it there”. Mark of a good book, I suppose.

Melancholy

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