Intermezzo

Intermezzo is the fourth novel by the Irish author Sally Rooney, published by Faber & Faber on 24 September 2024. It is set in Dublin and rural Ireland and follows two brothers in the aftermath of their father's death.

Peter is a thirty-two-year-old human rights lawyer whose relationships with his younger girlfriend Naomi and his former girlfriend Sylvia are both unresolved, and he is self-medicating in order to sleep after the death. Ivan is twenty-two, a former chess prodigy who begins a relationship with Margaret, a thirty-six-year-old arts programme director emerging from a turbulent past of her own. The novel explores grief, age-gap relationships, sibling dynamics and the power structures inside romantic relationships.

It was Rooney's first novel to centre on male protagonists and on relationships between men. She developed the book from an initial scene of a chess exhibition at an arts centre and from watching chess tutorials during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and the title refers to a musical interlude, which is the sense in which the novel treats this period in the brothers' lives as a passage between other things.