Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, is her longest and best consideration of ‘idiotic desire and love’ yet

By Orlaith Darling, Postdoctoral Fellow, Contemporary English Literature and Critical Theory, University College Dublin

On the level of theme, the Irish writer Sally Rooney is firmly in her wheelhouse in her new novel Intermezzo. We find Peter and Ivan Koubek having just lost their father and trying to forge a life through and past this bereavement by way of intimate relationships.

Peter, a barrister in his early 30s, is embroiled in a semi-secret situation-ship with a much younger college student and former sex worker, Naomi. He balances this with his longstanding and largely chaste relationship with a former long-term girlfriend, Sylvia.

Ivan, a decade younger and aeons less suave than…

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