Collected's 24in24 - Emma and Frankie recommend...Intermezzo - Sally Rooney

Emma says... So insightful. Fantastically, intelligently, and beautifully written, structured, and finished. Engaging, heart-breaking, and affirming. The fullness of these characters is off the chart, in all their messiness and contradiction. Painful to read but hard to put down - definitely Rooney's best and definitely a top read of 2024.

Frankie says... Stayed with me long after I finished it, this book with break your heart and leave an impression only Rooney’s modern style can conjure.

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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.

Intermezzo is an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney, author of the bestselling Normal People. A must-read for 2024.