Sally Rooney's Next Novel Is Coming In September

Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish Intermezzo by Sally Rooney on September 24. It is her fourth novel, after Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You. Mitzi Angel, FSG president and publisher, acquired U.S. rights from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. Knopf will publish the book in Canada, and Faber will publish it in the U.K. 

The book, the publisher said, follows two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, in the “wake of their father’s death”—brothers who, “aside from the fact that they are brothers...seem to have little in common.” Peter, a “successful, competent” Dublin lawyer in his thirties, is “medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women,” Sylvia and Naomi. Ivan, a 22-year-old competitive chess player who has “always seen himself as...the antithesis of his glib elder brother,” meets Margaret, a“n older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.”

“Two men, three women—two brothers and the women they love. Through the components of everyday life, Sally Rooney builds a world of ethical complexity that matches that of the great nineteenth-century novels,” Angel said, in a statement. “Intermezzo is an astonishing novel: it marks yet another advance in the work of a writer who captures our life and our times with more stylistic elan and generosity of spirit than ever.”