Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo set for September release

Intermezzo, the story of two grieving brothers, will be the fourth book from the Normal People and Conversations with Friends author

Sally Rooney’s new book Intermezzo will be released by Faber on 24 September this year.

It will be the fourth novel published by the international best-selling author of Normal People and Conversations With Friends.

The new book will break the format of its predecessors as it follows two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, and their very different ways of dealing with the death of their father.

Peter, a lawyer in his thirties is successful, confident and apparently unassailable. However, he struggles with grief and self-medicates while struggling to manage relationships with two very different women.

His relationship with his first love Sylvia is enduring, but Naomi, a college student, feels life is one long joke.

Ivan is Peter’s 22-year-old brother and a competitive chess player. He sees himself as socially awkward, a loner and the opposite of his elder brother. He meets an older woman called Margaret who is emerging from a turbulent past and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

Publisher Faber adds: “For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is 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.”

Sally Rooney’s new book will be released in September (Getty Images)

Intermezzo comes after Beautiful World, Where Are You and the global success of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.

Alex Bowler, Publisher, acquired UK & Commonwealth and audio rights from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. Knopf will publish in Canada and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US.

It follows the global success of Normal People (PA)

He said: ‘Intermezzo is a story of brothers and lovers, of familial and romantic intimacies, of relationships that don’t quite fit the conventional structures.

“After three miraculous books, Sally Rooney’s millions of readers will recognise the beauty and insight, the pain and hope that radiates from this new novel. But it marks an exquisite advance, too, in the work of a writer who seems so attuned to our lives, our hearts and our times.”