May 22, 2024, 8:25am
This morning, FSG revealed the US cover for Sally Rooney’s forthcoming novel, Intermezzo, which be published on September 24. It brings back that trademark Rooney yellow (c. Conversations with Friends) updated with some mature gray and an old-school Big Book font, which makes it look like something you might discover under a large stack in a used bookstore, which would then go on to change your life. Also, chess.
Without any further ado, here’s the cover, which was designed by June Park:
And here’s the publisher’s description of the book:
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 who doesn’t take life too seriously.
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.
Sound like your kind of game? You can start reading (albeit barely) right here.