Intermezzo

Margaret and Ivan are siblings — estranged, now reconciled, navigating the death of their father and the residue of a childhood that marked both of them in ways they have spent their adult lives not examining. They are also, it emerges slowly, perhaps in love with each other. Rooney’s fourth novel is her most formally ambitious and her most emotionally confrontational: a book that takes a taboo subject and approaches it with the same clear-eyed intelligence she brings to everything, refusing both sensationalism and comfortable elision.

Intermezzo is also, in its portrait of Ivan — a chess prodigy in his early twenties, too intelligent for the world he finds himself in, desperately in need of something he cannot quite name — one of the most psychologically acute character portraits Rooney has produced.

For readers who have been with Rooney from the beginning — her most mature and most challenging novel. Published by Faber & Faber.