If you can’t wait to read (or listen to) Sally Rooney’s upcoming novel Intermezzo, start here!
PEOPLE has an exclusive first listen of the opening chapter of the Irish novelist’s highly-anticipated fourth novel. The audiobook, which comes out this September alongside the hardcover and ebook editions, will also be narrated by Éanna Hardwicke, who played Rob Hegarty in the Hulu adaptation of Rooney’s 2018 novel Normal People.
“I am a huge fan of Sally Rooney’s writing. She has a beautiful way of bringing us into her character’s hearts and minds,” says Hardwicke in a statement shared with PEOPLE. “Normal People, like so many others, played a big part in my life, and I have been moved and transported by each of Sally’s wonderful novels. They do what great stories do: make you laugh, make you cry and — hopefully — see the world a little more vividly afterward.”
Macmillan Audio
“Her writing was a real gift to act, so it is a privilege to get to share in the Intermezzo story and to try and capture Sally’s inimitable voice,” the actor continues. Listen to him read from the book below.
Listen to Éanna Hardwicke read from ‘Intermezzo’
Intermezzo follows two brothers in the wake of their father’s death. Peter, a Dublin-based lawyer, has turned to self-medicating to get to sleep and is balancing relationships with two different women. His younger brother, Ivan, is a socially awkward chess prodigy who finds himself involved with an older woman.
The novel, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S. and Faber & Faber in the UK, deals with the “desire, despair and possibility” that follows Peter, Ivan and their partners through this new period in their lives.
Macmillan Audio
Rooney is the bestselling author of the novels Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021).
Normal People was adapted into a 2020 Hulu series starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. The TV adaptation of Conversations with Friends also premiered on Hulu in 2022, and starred Joe Alwyn, Alison Oliver, Sasha Lane and Jemima Kirke.
“Through the components of everyday life, Sally Rooney builds a world of ethical complexity that matches that of the great 19th-century novels,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux President and Publisher Mitzi Angel previously said of the novel. “Intermezzo is an astonishing novel: it marks yet another advance in the work of a writer who captures our life and our times with more stylistic elan and generosity of spirit than ever.”
Intermezzo will be published on Sept. 24 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.
