Tag Archives: sally rooney

Intermezzo – Sally Rooney

Intermezzo – Sally Rooney

I am a Sally Rooney fan. I was keen to read this and my daughter received an ARC, but she didn’t get onto it, so in the end I listened to it (highly recommended by someone from my stitching group). It was a very good decision to listen to it, the narrator was fabulous.

Here’s the blurb …

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.

I think this is my favourite of her novels. The writing is beautiful, it’s written from the perspectives of Ivan, Margaret and Peter, and each of their voices are different. I loved how internal it was, we were in their heads. Ivan was my favourite. There is a lot of thinking about what it means to be a good person and to live a good life. It is very thought provoking. And it’s about relationships: brothers, mothers and sons, lovers, and friends.

A review.

Leave a Comment

Filed under 5, Audio, Fiction, Recommended, Serious

Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney

Conversation with Friends – Sally Rooney

I got this from the library and probably too soon after Normal People– they are very similar.

Here’s the blurb …


WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PFD YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2018
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOT PRIZE 2018
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2018
SUNDAY TIMESOBSERVER AND TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and observant. A student in Dublin and an aspiring writer, at night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are interviewed and then befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence, beginning a complex menage-a-quatre. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, the sharply witty and emotion-averse Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time. 

Look at all of those prizes and short lists.

This is beautifully written and contains an exploration of class in Dublin society. I don’t want to be disparaging, but I also found it to be a lot of twenty-something angst. I suspect I feel this way because I read this and Normal People within a few months of each other.

Another review and another.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Fiction