INTERMEZZO (HB)

The latest novel from the author of Normal People is an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. 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. 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. Grieving after their father's death, the brothers and the people they love find themselves in 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.