Intermezzo

Sally Rooney's fourth novel, set in Dublin and rural Ireland, follows the brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek in the weeks after their father's death. Peter, a lawyer in his thirties, is medicating himself to sleep and struggling with his relationships with two very different women, Naomi, a student, and Sylvia, his first love. Ivan, a 22-year-old chess player who sees himself as an awkward loner, meets Margaret, an older woman with a turbulent past, and their lives quickly become intertwined. It was Rooney's first novel to center on male protagonists and relationships between men, and its title refers both to a musical interlude and to chess. In Ireland it was the fastest-selling book of 2024.

Barack Obama included it among his favorite books of 2024.