Conversations With Friends made us question the power dynamics of love. Beautiful World, Where Are You made us question the lies we’ve been sold about the lives we live. Normal People broke our hearts entirely. Now Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s newly announced fourth novel will tell the story of brothers, familial and romantic intimacies and relationships that don’t quite fit the conventional structures. 

Set to be published by Faber on 24 September, Intermezzo features Rooney’s trademark theme of fraught, complicated relationships between young people, this time focusing on brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek.

As the synopsis reads, aside from the fact that they are related, Peter and Ivan seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his 30s – 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, on the other hand, 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,” a representative for Faber shared of the announcement. “But it marks an exquisite advance, too, in the work of a writer who seems so attuned to our lives, our hearts and our times.”

Rooney’s previous novels have all been international bestsellers. Normal People (starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Conversations With Friends have been adapted for smash-hit BBC television series and her most recent title, Beautiful World, Where Are You, sold more than 40,000 copies in just five days when it was published in 2021.

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