New novel from Mayo's Sally Rooney

INTERMEZZO, the fourth novel from international bestselling Mayo writer Sally Rooney, will hit book shelves this autumn.

September 24 is the publication date for what is a much anticipated new book, following on from the much celebrated Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You.

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 22-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.

After three miraculous books, Sally Rooney’s millions of readers will recognise the beauty and insight, the pain and hope that radiates from this new novel.