To join the club, subscribe for free below to access club chats on the Substack app, where you can message your thoughts while you read! Plus, I send you weekly prompts to get us chatting about the book. Comment, have fun, and share the book club with a friend!
One thing I enjoy is participating in cultural moments, especially to join the conversation. As I write this, readers are lining up at book shops to purchase Intermezzo, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. It’ll be fun to read this with people across the world at the same time! Another thing I enjoy is great writing, and Rooney’s crisply edited sentences will be a pleasure to experience again.
Details:
Literary fiction, 464 pages, publishes 9/24/2024
Premise: 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 twenty-two-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.
“An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love…”
Grab your copies, in any form you wish, and let’s read baby!
I’ll see you in my chat (in the Substack app!) to discuss this book while we read during October!! Yay! Who’s in? Let me know in the comments.
This is definitely not a book that I would even consider picking up, but many of the books that have come out of this club haven't been books that I would have read otherwise. And I've enjoyed all of them! I'm excited to delve into this one next month and continue to read things that are beyond my comfort zone. 💖
I love that Carissa! You’re so right, we truly have read a variety of unique books. A couple have surprised me too! It’ll be interesting to read a book en masse this time around too. ❣️
Oooooh I have not been able to get through a book in a while but Sally Rooney might just do the trick <3
Yay, let’s see if it does! 🥰 I’ve heard the audiobook is compelling too if you like to listen to those
This is definitely not a book that I would even consider picking up, but many of the books that have come out of this club haven't been books that I would have read otherwise. And I've enjoyed all of them! I'm excited to delve into this one next month and continue to read things that are beyond my comfort zone. 💖
I love that Carissa! You’re so right, we truly have read a variety of unique books. A couple have surprised me too! It’ll be interesting to read a book en masse this time around too. ❣️