In the first global event for publication, join Sally Rooney in conversation with Fintan O’Toole and reading from her much-anticipated fourth novel, 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.

This event is in partnership with Faber. Exclusive pre-publication copies will be made available by Books Upstairs.

Sally Rooney is the author of Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You. All three of her novels have been international bestsellers, and her work is translated into over forty languages. Her first two novels have been adapted as television series for the BBC. In 2022, TIME magazine named her among the 100 most influential people in global culture. She lives and works in County Mayo where she was born.

Presented by NCH