Rejoice! A new title from Sally Rooney is coming this year

‘Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.’

Those are the opening lines from Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s freshly announced title.

What an incredibly good day for Irish book news.

Having thoroughly stolen our hearts with Normal People and Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney is an author who has managed to create and define a niche genre of storytelling since her debut title in 2017. Over the past seven years, Rooney has become one of Ireland—and Mayo’s— proudest literary exports, and the television adaptations of her work have thrust Paul Mescal and Alison Oliver into the global spotlight.

It’s been three long years since the release of Beautiful World, Where Are You, and at long last, international bestseller Sally Rooney is making her grand return with Intermezzo, which will be published by Faber on 24 September 2024. Just one day before my birthday, so this is huge news for me personally. In Sally we trust.

By now Rooney’s millions of readers will instantly recognise the beauty and insight, the pain and hope that’s set to radiate from this new novel. However, it’s been said that this endeavour marks an exquisite advance in the work of a writer who seems so attuned to our lives, our hearts and our times. I quite literally cannot wait.

Below is a synopsis of what Intermezzo is all about…

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.

Publisher Alex Bowler said: “Intermezzo is a story of brothers and lovers, of familial and romantic intimacies, of relationships that don’t quite fit the conventional structures.”

Sounds like a Sally Rooney special to me. September can’t come quite enough.

Sally Rooney image by Kalpesh Lathigra.