Attention sad people! Sally Rooney has a new novel on the way, set to be published this autumn under the title Intermezzo. The book will be the Normal People author’s fourth novel, since she made her debut with Conversations with Friends in 2017.
The plot of Intermezzo is centred on two brothers named Peter and Ivan Koubek, a Dublin lawyer and a socially awkward competitive chess player, respectively. With little in common, the pair’s lives are changed after their father dies and they respectively enter into a typically tangled and complex knot of relationships.
A supposedly successful Dublin lawyer in his 30s, Peter turns to self-medication after his father’s death, and struggles to manage his relationships with two “very different” women: his first love, Sylvia, and an irreverent college student named Naomi. At the same time, the 22-year-old Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman with her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly intertwined.
“For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude,” reads a statement from publisher Faber and Faber, “a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.”
Rooney’s last published novel was Beautiful World, Where Are You, released in 2021. That same year, the author turned down an Israeli publisher’s offer to buy translation rights for the book due to the state’s occupation of Palestinian territories, and has continued to be outspoken about violence in Gaza. In 2022, Time magazine named her one of the most influential people in the world.
The cover of Intermezzo is yet to be revealed, but we do know that the novel is set to be published on September 24, 2024.