Intermezzo
Sally Rooney, 2024
Romance Contemporary fictionLiterary fiction
Two brothers, one bereaved summer, and the careful negotiations of love — Rooney's close, unsparing attention to how people actually talk to each other. A close, tender book of longing and family, with Rooney's lyrical attention to the halting ways people talk and remember.
Feels like longing, tenderness and wonder. About love, family and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy literary fiction about siblings, grief, and the awkward negotiations of love. The bereaved summer and close interior attention can feel heavy and slow if you want a lighter escape.
Why read it
Rooney's ear for the halting ways people speak to each other makes this a book about grief and love that feels immediate and human.
A page from the book
Wanting to disappear completely, and to be loved completely, in the same breath.
Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved. Sally Rooney.Rooney published her first novel at twenty-six; her second, Normal People, became a television series in 2020.
Books that feel like this
More by Sally Rooney
Normal People
Sally Rooney, 2018
Two teenagers who ignore each other in public begin a secret intimacy that follows them through school and university, where class and misreading keep reshaping love.
Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney, 2017
Two student spoken-word poets fall in with a photographer and her actor husband, and four Dublin lives begin quietly rearranging each other.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Intermezzo for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy literary fiction about siblings, grief, and the awkward negotiations of love. The bereaved summer and close interior attention can feel heavy and slow if you want a lighter escape.
- What is Intermezzo like?
- A close, tender book of longing and family, with Rooney's lyrical attention to the halting ways people talk and remember. Feels like longing, tenderness and wonder. About love, family and memory.
- What should I read after Intermezzo?
- If you liked Intermezzo, try It Ends with Us (Colleen Hoover), Wild Side (Elsie Silver) and One Italian Summer (Rebecca Serle).
A taste of the feed
The grief that has no funeral, no memories, no name.
Grieving something that never was and never will be is a special sort of hell.
Wild Side · Elsie Silver
What a house becomes when no one has been living in it.
“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf strewn driveway.
The God of Small Things · Arundhati Roy
What you say when a perfect week is almost over.
Let’s pretend that time doesn’t exist. Let’s pretend that this week isn’t ending. Let’s pretend that we will always be us—happy, sunburnt, and tangled up together.
The Summer of Broken Rules · K.L. Walther
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