The Irish author explores bereavement and age-gap relationships in a breathtakingly intimate tale of two brothers and the women they turn to

If any few pages of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel blew through the streets on an autumn wind, many a chance reader would be sure who wrote them. They’d recognise the sentences precision-engineered for weight distribution like wide-span bridges. They’d find moment-by-moment emotion, coolly itemised; monosyllabic dialogue occasionally breaking the surface while immense currents of introspection flow beneath; breathtakingly intimate and properly sexy sex, felt from the inside and piously revered as a moral force. Here again, in short order and at great length, are qualities familiar from Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). Intermezzo is an accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon. It’s also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger.

Two brothers have just lost their father; we’re in the weeks of disorientation after the funeral. Ivan Koubek is 22, quietly cerebral, excelling as a competitive chess player and acutely aware of finding social interaction difficult. He’s “a complete oddball” according to Peter, but then Peter, a smooth-talking barrister who needs to be right, is getting a lot of things wrong. In steadily alternating chapters that carry on, left, right, while the protagonists lose and find their bearings, Ivan embarks on an ardent relationship that surprises all who know him, and sexually voracious Peter, 10 years older, negotiates his desire for two diametrically different women. Ivan’s neurodiverse experience of the world, slowly and attentively rendered, yields its own forms of eloquence, his uncertain use of language contrasting with Peter’s outward fluency, his silences busy with feeling, his mind and body alive with doubt and perception. As suppressed emotions veer sideways, we find Ivan in astonished rapture, and Peter’s self‑satisfaction running close to nihilistic despair.