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Sally Rooney, author of Intermezzo

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. 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. In the early weeks of his bereavement, he 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.

Week of September 22, 2025

Paperback releases for the week of September 22nd include INTERMEZZO, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family --- but especially love --- from Sally Rooney; GOING HOME IN THE DARK by Dean Koontz, a novel about childhood fears and buried secrets that threaten to be unearthed when hometown horrors come back to haunt; H. W. Brands' AMERICA FIRST, which recounts the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures --- President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh; SHE-WOLVES, in which award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the propulsive story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging '60s to 9/11; and the paperback original FAMOUS by Blake Crouch, a darkly comedic psychological suspense novel about a man who goes to terrifying extremes to adopt his celebrity doppelgänger's life.