Calling all tote-bag wearing sad gals (gender neutral): Sally Rooney is publishing another book called Intermezzo(!!!). And yes, before you ask, it is indeed about complicated relationships and the inevitable grief that comes with them. Readers are warned that side effects may include chest pains and staring at the wall for long periods of time afterwards.
Most will know Rooney as the author of beloved book Normal People, which was adapted into a television show that gifted us THE Paul Mescal.
Her debut novel Conversations with Friends was also adapted into a series starring king Joe Alwyn, and her third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You was, predictably, yet another international best seller.
I suspect her fourth novel, Intermezzo, will soon be just as beloved.
What will Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo be about?
Described as a “story of brothers and lovers, of familial and romantic intimacies, [and] of relationships that don’t quite fit the conventional structures” by its publisher, Intermezzo follows two siblings who are different in almost every way — and yet their relationships are just as complicated.
Maybe, in the end, they will realise they feel in ways that are more similar than they think?
Or maybe, in the end, it’ll be me that has an epiphany and then a mental breakdown. Who knows!
Here’s the blurb for Intermezzo:
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.
And yes, there’s even a little snippet that you can read to prepare yourself for what’s to come:
What does “Intermezzo” mean?
If you’re wondering what the title actually means, “intermezzo” is described by the Oxford dictionary as “a short connecting instrumental movement in an opera or other musical work” or “a light dramatic, musical, or other performance inserted between the acts of a play.”
What the significance of this will be in the novel remains to be seen.
Intermezzo will hit release on September 24. Which, if a publisher is reading this, is just in time for my birthday. Hehe.
