Leírás
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller
Short-listed for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year
Long-listed for the DUBLIN Literary Award
Named a Best Book of the Year and a Critics’ Pick by The New York Times
Named an Essential Read by The New Yorker
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, Financial Times, Vogue, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, The Times (UK), Apple Books, and more
A USA Today, People, and Associated Press Top 10 Book of the Year
One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024
One of Chicago Public Library’s Favorite Books of the Year
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, 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.
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.
“There is so much relief . . . in turning to a Sally Rooney novel: taking the weight of her elegant, deeply felt sentences; feeling how much control she has over the words she’s using; how strongly she believes that they should be as beautiful as she can make them. At last, the chance to relax in the presence of someone who knows what she’s doing.” ― Constance Grady, Vox
“[Rooney's] characters are distinct individuals whose names and actions are easy to recall, even years after reading the books.” ― B. D. McClay, Wall Street Journal
“The depths Rooney plumbs are idiosyncratically hers. In Intermezzo, Rooney brilliantly and hypnotically creates a universe parallel to the worlds she has created in three previous novels.” ― Michael Pearson, New York Journal of Books
“On a construction level, it’s Sally Rooney at her finest and most controlled . . . To discount the recurrence of certain themes and characterizations across her novels as unoriginal is to overlook the profundity of this novel . . . Again and again, Rooney’s novels pose questions about what love is and how it shapes our lives . . . If Intermezzo is any indication, the author’s literary finesse grows with each new novel.” ― Cait O’Neill, Chicago Review of Books
“Rooney zooms in on these brothers with prose that is precise and rhythmic, her long paragraphs transmitting the winding nature of their inner worlds, how thoughts repeat and morph and collide . . . It’s simple and yet complex; meticulous but alive; funny but deeply sad. It’s Sally Rooney’s best novel yet.”
―Mari Cohen, Jewish Currents
“There are moments of real poignancy and the two men’s hurt and grief, close to the surface, is often painful to read . . . This feels like a more mature novel―and in my opinion, [Rooney’s] best yet. There’s more introspection here, more vulnerability from the characters, and this allows a greater connection . . . Tender and true.” ― Joanne Finney, Good Housekeeping
“Rooney proves that she can cover more ground than what the literary world expects from her . . . Intermezzo is a powerful rejoinder to Rooney’s skeptics.” ― Tisya Mavuram, The American Prospect
“Intermezzo, [Rooney’s] fourth novel, is her most fully developed and moving yet . . . Intermezzo propels you to its well-earned, moving climax with nary a false move.” ― Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Kaleidoscopically beautiful and intimately human . . . To read a Sally Rooney novel is to grip humanity in the palm of your hand, and Intermezzo is no different.” ― Clare Mulroy, USA Today
“What’s fascinating about Rooney’s more recent attempts is how attuned she is to every social tightrope that constrains what we might have imagined would be free adulthood . . . There’s something brilliant and refreshing in Rooney’s choice to follow the private love affairs of two siblings once so closely connected . . . It’s a pleasure, this time, to get under the skin and into the compassionate private realities of these brothers who misperceive each other as villains.” ― Lillian Fishman, The Washington Post
“Wise, resonant and witty . . . There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea . . . Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading . . . Intermezzo wears its heart on its sleeve.” ― Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“The formal experiments are never idle but always at the service of a desire for emotional precision, for a more satisfactory rendering of the boundless complexity of the inner life . . . It is no small part of Rooney’s achievement in her latest novel that she portrays physical desire with tact and tenderness, without giving in to soft-focus sentimentalism . . . This bold, adventurous and captivating novel is a major addition to a body of work that never fails to surprise and engage.” ― Michael Cronin, The Irish Times
“Intermezzo is exquisite . . . It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s oceanic sentences, the waters go deep.” ― Constance Grady, Vox
“Intermezzo is perfect―truly wonderful―a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements . . . She leans fully into her gifts here: more characters, more complication, ‘more life,’ as Margaret thinks . . . Is there a better novelist at work right now?” ― Anthony Cummins, The Observer
“Intermezzo is an accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon. It’s also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger.” ― Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
“Intermezzo sees Rooney return to exceptional form with a novel as clever as her 2017 debut Conversations with Friends, and as engrossing as its 2018 follow-up Normal People . . . Love, as Rooney depicts it here, is a moral proposition, complete with obligations for solicitude and responsibility.”
―Shahidha Bari, Financial Times
“Intermezzo is scattered with the little gifts of psychological and emotional observation that are the most cherishable aspects of Rooney’s talent.” ― James Marriott, The Times
“Fascinating and delicate . . . The sheer amount of human relationships and dynamics, like in all of her previous novels, gives a wide range of conversations and thoughtful dialogues. Readers will want to read it again and again to catch every sly nuance.” ― Abby Sliva, The Minnesota Star Tribune
“Come for the romance; stay for the meaning of life, of which, of course, love is a fundamental part.” ― Martin Doyle, The Irish Times
“The arrival of a new Sally Rooney novel is always cause for celebration; there is simply no other novelist chronicling the early adulthood of disaffected youth in the 21st century with more care and compassion . . . In Intermezzo she broadens her scope and diverts from the casually complex conversational tone . . . The book rewards the effort.”
―Chloe Schama, Vogue
“Stylistically daring, emotionally explosive, and endlessly wise, this is Rooney’s best work yet.” ― Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily (Best of Fall)
“[Intermezzo] might be her best yet: a tale of depth and grand sweep, an understated study of characters caught circling the margin of some great and unknown thing, and a diversion of pure enjoyment, too. Rooney’s title tells us these brothers, in their love and fury for one another, are at an in-between moment, as she carefully, brilliantly writes them out of it.” ― Booklist (starred review)
“Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement . . . The novel’s deliberate pacing veers from the propulsiveness of Normal People and the deep character work contrasts with the topicality of Beautiful World, but in many ways this feels like Rooney’s most fully realized work, especially as she channels the modernist styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf . . . Even the author’s skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel’s forceful currents of feeling.”
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at―sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues―with newer moves . . . The characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real . . . Her grandmaster status remains intact.” ― Kirkus Reviews
