Reviews
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: A Review of Her Most Ambitious Novel
Sally Rooney's fourth novel trades her signature romantic couple for two grieving brothers, and critics are calling it her most formally ambitious and emotionally generous book yet.
Intermezzo (2024) is Sally Rooney's fourth novel and her first built around two brothers rather than a single romantic couple. Critics broadly praised it as her most formally ambitious and emotionally mature work, and it became the fastest-selling book in Ireland in 2024 despite not beating her own previous novel's opening-week numbers.
Sally Rooney's fourth novel arrived with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for a franchise installment. Faber & Faber, which has published all four of Rooney's novels in the UK and Ireland, backed Intermezzo with what reporting described as the publisher's biggest trade campaign to date, while Farrar, Straus and Giroux handled the US edition. Published on September 24, 2024, the novel departs from the template that made Rooney famous: instead of one couple negotiating intimacy and class, it follows two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, mourning their father in almost incompatible ways.
What is Intermezzo actually about?
Set in Dublin and rural Ireland in the weeks after the Koubek brothers' father dies, the novel splits its attention between Peter, a 32-year-old human rights lawyer, and Ivan, his 22-year-old brother and a former chess prodigy whose once-promising career stalled. Peter is entangled with two women: Naomi, a 23-year-old college student and his current girlfriend, and Sylvia, his ex and close friend, whose chronic pain following a car accident ended their romantic relationship years earlier. Ivan, meanwhile, meets Margaret Kearns, a 36-year-old arts-center director, at a chess exhibition, and the two begin a relationship complicated by their fourteen-year age gap. When Peter learns of it, he reacts with open disgust, and the brothers stop speaking — until Ivan's revived chess career and Margaret's intervention bring them back into the same room.
The chess motif in the title is not incidental. As Wikipedia's entry on the novel and multiple reviewers note, an intermezzo in chess is an unexpected in-between move that forces an opponent to respond immediately, derailing the expected sequence of play. Rooney uses that idea structurally: nearly every relationship in the book is disrupted by a move nobody saw coming, and Ivan's actual chess comeback gives the metaphor a literal counterpart inside the plot.
How does Intermezzo compare to Normal People and Conversations with Friends?
Rooney's first three novels — Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) — all orbit a central couple whose on-again, off-again dynamic supplies narrative propulsion. Slate's review argued that Intermezzo deliberately withholds that engine: there is no single 'Sally Rooney girl' for readers to project onto, and a novel structured around grief cannot generate the same forward pull as one structured around whether two people will end up together. NPR's review reached a similar but more favorable conclusion, calling Intermezzo 'less disturbing' than Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You, yet 'her most fully developed and moving' novel overall, in part because of that restraint.
Stylistically, the novel is also Rooney's most varied. According to summaries of its narrative technique, Peter's sections are told in staccato, fragmented sentences that echo the interior monologue style associated with James Joyce, Ivan's narration is cooler and drier, and Margaret's passages move at a slower, more deliberate pace. That tripling of voice is new for Rooney, whose earlier novels kept a more uniform close-third or first-person register throughout.
| Novel | Year | Central structure | UK first-week sales (Republic of Ireland) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversations with Friends | 2017 | Two-couple friendship/affair | ~65 copies |
| Normal People | 2018 | Single on-off couple | ~1,254 copies |
| Beautiful World, Where Are You | 2021 | Two couples, epistolary interludes | ~12,635 copies |
| Intermezzo | 2024 | Two brothers, three relationships | ~11,885 copies |
What did critics and readers think of Intermezzo?
Reception skewed strongly positive, though not unanimously. The Washington Times described the book as 'a portrait of grief not fully internalized,' pointing to how neither brother can talk about their father's death, let alone to each other. The Guardian's Alexandra Harris called it more 'philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger' than Rooney's earlier work, while a separate Guardian review from Anthony Cummins asked bluntly whether there is 'a better writer at work right now.' Not every critic was won over: some reviewers found the age-gap relationships at the novel's center uncomfortable or under-interrogated, and others felt the book, Rooney's longest, dragged across its 464-page FSG edition.
The novel's staying power showed up in year-end recognition. By December 2024, Literary Hub tallied Intermezzo on twenty separate 'best books of the year' lists. In September 2025 it won the Sky Arts Award for literature, beating nominees Alan Hollinghurst's Our Evenings and Gwyneth Lewis's Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling. Rooney did not attend the ceremony in person; her editor at Faber, Alex Bowler, accepted on her behalf and read a statement from the author.
How well did Intermezzo sell, and what does that say about Rooney's trajectory?
Commercially, Intermezzo became the fastest-selling book in the Republic of Ireland in 2024, moving 11,885 copies there in its first five days on sale and 44,233 copies in the UK over the same period, according to Nielsen BookScan data reported by The Irish Times. Its nearest domestic competitor that week, Graham Norton's Frankie, sold just 1,836 copies by comparison. Bookshops opened early to meet demand, and Dubray Books, Ireland's largest independent chain, expected it to be its best-selling title of the year.
What's easy to miss in the fastest-selling-book headline is that Intermezzo did not actually out-open Rooney's own prior novel. Beautiful World, Where Are You sold 12,635 copies in the Republic and 47,562 in the UK in its first week back in September 2021 — both figures slightly higher than Intermezzo's. The more striking long-arc comparison is to Rooney's earliest work: her debut, Conversations with Friends, sold only about 65 copies in Ireland in its first week in 2017, and Normal People sold roughly 1,254 copies in its first week in 2018, before word of mouth and Emmy-nominated television adaptations of both books transformed her commercial standing. Read against that trajectory, Intermezzo's opening confirms Rooney as a stable, top-tier commercial force in literary fiction rather than marking a new sales peak.
Is Intermezzo worth reading?
For readers already invested in Rooney's fiction, the critical consensus leans toward yes, and toward this being her most technically accomplished novel. Its slower structure and grief-first premise mean it rewards patience more than her earlier, more overtly romantic novels did; readers looking for the propulsive will-they-won't-they of Normal People may find the pacing frustrating in the book's first half, when the brothers barely interact. Readers drawn to sibling estrangement, interiority, and formally ambitious prose — the kind of themes recognized by the Sky Arts Award judges, who called the novel 'a quietly devastating exploration of grief, desire, and emotional dislocation' — are likely to find Intermezzo the most rewarding entry in Rooney's catalogue to date.
Frequently asked
What is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney about?
Intermezzo, published by Faber & Faber in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US on September 24, 2024, follows brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek in Dublin in the weeks after their father's death. Peter is a 32-year-old human rights lawyer torn between his ex-girlfriend Sylvia and his younger girlfriend Naomi. Ivan is a 22-year-old former chess prodigy whose stalled career revives just as he begins a relationship with Margaret, a 36-year-old arts center director. The title refers to a chess move, an unexpected intermediate step that forces an opponent to respond before continuing the expected sequence, which mirrors the brothers' halting reconciliation.
Is Intermezzo based on a true story?
No. Intermezzo is a work of literary fiction, not a memoir or true-crime account. According to reporting on its origin, Sally Rooney began by imagining a scene of a simultaneous chess exhibition at a small-town Irish arts center and a woman observing a young player there; she then built out Ivan's character before realizing he needed an older brother, Peter, to give the novel its shape. The Dublin and rural-Ireland settings, chess subculture, and legal-aid work drawn on for Peter's job are researched and realistic, but the Koubek family and its members are invented characters, per Wikipedia's entry on the novel.
How does Intermezzo compare to Normal People and Conversations with Friends?
Critics were near-unanimous that Intermezzo is a structural and tonal departure. Where Normal People and Conversations with Friends orbit a single will-they-won't-they couple, Intermezzo centers two brothers and three distinct romantic entanglements, using different prose styles for each narrator, according to Wikipedia's summary of its style. Slate argued the novel deliberately withholds the 'engine of hope' that powered Rooney's earlier romances, since a grief narrative lacks that built-in momentum. NPR called it 'less disturbing' than Normal People yet ultimately 'her most fully developed and moving' book to date.
What did critics say about Intermezzo?
Reception was largely positive. NPR called it Rooney's 'most fully developed and moving' novel yet, and The Washington Times described it as 'a portrait of grief not fully internalized.' Other critics were more mixed: some found the age-gap relationships uncomfortable or felt the book's length dragged in stretches, per aggregated commentary collected on Book Marks. By December 2024, Literary Hub tallied Intermezzo on twenty separate 'best books of the year' lists, and in 2025 it won the Sky Arts Award for literature, beating nominees Alan Hollinghurst and Gwyneth Lewis, according to The Bookseller.
How well did Intermezzo sell?
Very well. Intermezzo became the fastest-selling book in the Republic of Ireland in 2024, selling 11,885 copies there in its first five days and 44,233 copies in the UK in the same window, according to Nielsen data reported by The Irish Times. Its nearest domestic rival that week, Graham Norton's Frankie, sold only 1,836 copies. Notably, Rooney's own prior novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, actually opened stronger in 2021 with 12,635 Irish copies and 47,562 UK copies in its first week, showing Intermezzo extended rather than set an all-time personal sales record.
What is the significance of the chess motif in Intermezzo's title?
An intermezzo, in chess, is an unexpected in-between move that forces an opponent to respond immediately before the anticipated sequence resumes, throwing the game briefly off its expected course. The Guardian's review by Alexandra Harris noted that this concept structures the novel itself: characters repeatedly make moves, romantic and otherwise, that interrupt each other's expected trajectories. Because Ivan is written as a former chess prodigy attempting a comeback, the game is also literal within the plot, not just a structural metaphor, giving the title a double meaning that ties form to content.
Should new readers start with Intermezzo or an earlier Sally Rooney novel?
It depends on what a reader wants. Intermezzo is a longer, more stylistically varied book, at 464 pages in its FSG edition, that assumes some familiarity with Rooney's preoccupations with class, intimacy, and interiority. Readers who loved the propulsive romantic pull of Normal People or Conversations with Friends may find Intermezzo slower and less driven by a single love story, since Slate and other critics noted it deliberately lacks that novel's central couple. Readers most interested in grief, sibling estrangement, and formally ambitious prose may prefer starting here.