New book by best-selling Mayo author to be published soon

Intermezzo, the fourth novel by best-selling Mayo author Sally Rooney, will be published by on September 24.

It will feature Rooney’s trademark theme of complicated relationships between young people, but this time the focus will primarily be on two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek.

"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,” publisher Faber and Faber’s description of the novel reads.

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.

But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

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.

Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

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.

Castle Books in Castlebar is inviting pre-orders of signed copies in store and online.

The shop described it as "the most anticipated book of the year."