Sally Rooney: Intermezzo

This event will also be streamed.
 
The bestselling author of Normal People celebrates her fourth novel in conversation with writer and literary critic Merve Emre.
 
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 30s – 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 22-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.
 
Rooney is joined on stage by author, academic and literary critic Merve Emre to discuss this story of familial and romantic intimacies.