Rooney's 'Intermezzo' comes out in September; lose yourself in these books while you wait.
Sally Rooney arrived on the literary scene in 2017 with her debut novel Conversations With Friends, but she truly became a household name with the adaptation of her sophomore novel, Normal People, starring Daisy Edgar Jones and Paul Mescal. Normal People became a must-watch Hulu series during lockdown causing a boom in popularity for the book. In 2021, she released her most recent novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, and the following year she scored a second series adaptation from the BBC for Conversations with Friends, starring Joe Alwyn. Now, her fourth novel, Intermezzo, is slated for release on September 24.
Fans have been eagerly awaiting this new novel after a lengthy hiatus. While Rooney’s novels have heavily explored themes of complex romantic love as well as friendship and fame, Intermezzo promises additional layers delving into grief and the complications of familial relationships. The novel follows two brothers struggling to connect on anything beyond the devastating loss of their father and the love interests who become intertwined in their lives through the tumultuous period.
To get through the long summer before Intermezzo’s September release, here are ten books perfect for fans of any or all of Rooney’s prior books.
Caroline O’Donoghue’s most recent novel The Rachel Incident often draws comparison to Rooney’s work. There are several surface similarities as O’Donoghue is also an Irish writer telling a story set in and after university, but they also have complementary writing styles that, while distinct, should please readers looking for thoughtful contemplations of young adulthood. Rachel is finishing her English degree, living in Cork, Ireland, in a house on Shandon Street with her best friend, James. She works at a bookstore and contemplates her future prospects in the face of the 2010 recession. During their time at Shandon Street, James navigates a tumultuous romantic relationship with an older man while Rachel is on a much more interior journey learning how to assert herself and find her course in life. O’Donoghue’s style puts great focus on subtle nuances and the small interactions that ultimately change everything. Rooney is a popular point of comparison to sell books these days, but The Rachel Incident truly earns the badge.
While a nonfiction title might seem like an odd suggestion, Conversations on Love is thematically relevant to Rooney’s novels. Often, there are messy romantic relationships at the core of Rooney’s work as well as threads of complicated friendships. She is ultimately concerned with how much love still matters in the face of a bleak world. Lunn’s collection of essays, pulling together voices from a large number of writers and experts, is the perfect place to dive deeper into a serious contemplation of love. While romantic love is often given the spotlight—and that is where the collection begins—the book gives a much more expansive picture of what love can be. There are essays about found family and friendship, familial love and the side effects of having loved, like grief. Conversations on Love addresses the topic from every possible angle while utilizing the keen attention to detail that Rooney’s fans will appreciate.
Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel is already a literary gem. Though this is Akbar’s first novel, he is already an accomplished poet, which is evident in the effortlessly lyrical quality of his prose. Like Rooney’s novels, Martyr! invites you to read with a highlighter in hand. Cyrus feels like he’s stalled out in life by his mid-twenties as he’s working through addiction recovery and a scattered career in poetry. While he doesn’t care about his life, he wants his death to matter, so he starts researching and writing about historical martyrs. Eventually, he travels to New York City to meet an artist who is spending the end of her life as an exhibit at the museum. As Cyrus embarks on this quest, he’s forced to dive into his family history and Iranian roots, find a connection with a sense of identity and locate a sense of purpose. If you identified with the feeling of being adrift in Beautiful World Where Are You, Martyr! contemplates a similar search for rooted connection.
While Wellness might seem like an odd comparison to Rooney’s typically short novels, it’s the perfect book to prepare you for Intermezzo’s staggering jump in length to 464 pages. Additionally, Hill has a gift for demonstrating the vast complexities and idiosyncrasies within people. This expansive novel tells the story of Jack and Elizabeth, both as a couple and through their separate coming-of-age stories in small Midwestern towns. Jack and Elizabeth meet in Chicago as they watch each other through adjacent apartment windows, and Wellness sees them through becoming parents and navigating middle age. Rooney and Hill both prioritize highlighting the inherent contradictions in human nature and delivering novels that are even greater upon reflection.
While Rooney writes with an awareness of the cultural and political events unfolding around her, Ripe exists fully within the bleaker aspects of culture. There’s a deep cynicism baked into the portrayal of Cassie’s life working at a Silicon Valley tech start-up in the lead-up to the Covid-19 pandemic. Cassie is stuck with a boyfriend who will never be able to commit to her, a soul-sucking job, the news of a pregnancy she definitely doesn’t want and a black hole of depression devotedly swirling over her head. While Etter doesn’t offer an optimistic view on early twenties life in America, she does offer catharsis and an undeniable voice that makes the book easy to devour. Beautiful World Where Are You closes with the beginning of the pandemic, and Ripe ups the tension by placing the narrative at the uncertain precipice of the pandemic right before quarantine.
Melissa Broder is famous for her surrealist spin on contemporary literary novels. She uses outlandish premises or details to get at the quieter interpersonal stories underneath. Similar to Beautiful World Where Are You, Death Valley focuses on a writer who has removed herself from her regular life to focus on her writing. The narrator checks into a Best Western in the desert outside of L.A. where she hopes to escape the weight of her father’s hospitalization in the ICU. There, she finds a hiking trail with a magical cactus. She crawls inside and hallucinates a variety of scenarios featuring important figures from her life. Over the short span of the novel, Broder forces the narrator to reevaluate her entire perspective around life and death.
Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell is best known for her recent novels Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, but her debut novel, After You’d Gone, shares the most DNA with Rooney’s work. O’Farrell’s lyrical prose creates a gorgeous impressionist painting on the page, but it’s the totality of the portrait the reader is left with at the end of the novel that truly makes this book impressive. While Normal People spans several years, After You’d Gone reaches even further through time. After Alice falls into a coma, O’Farrell stitches together her life story by weaving through time–flashing back to her parents’ first meeting and Alice’s childhood then moving forward to show her adult life leading up to the accident. This fractured extended coming-of-age novel is liable to induce an existential crisis.
Connell and Marianne will forever be defined by their connection in Normal People, and while Big Swiss approaches weighty connection from an entirely different angle, Greta’s life is significantly defined by the woman she first knows as Big Swiss. Greta lives in a rundown farmhouse infested with bees where she transcribes therapy sessions for an eccentric psychologist. She becomes fascinated by one of his clients, who she nicknames Big Swiss. Being a small town, though, the two eventually meet, and Greta forms a relationship with this mysterious client without disclosing their awkward one-sided connection. And, like Conversations with Friends, it will leave readers contemplating where ethics come into play with matters of the heart.
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For all the Conversations with Friends fans, Happy Hour is a must-read. Frances and Bobbi make a hot and cold dynamic duo, and they are perfectly matched by Gala and Isa from this novel. As young twenty-somethings, Gala and Isla are trying to scrape through a summer abroad in New York City working odd jobs under the table and leveraging tenuously forged connections. Their friendship, though first appearing strong, is continuously tested as they navigate the harsh realities of the city. Similar to Florence and Bobbi’s freewheeling summer entangled with the married writer-actor couple, Happy Hour delves into the larger implications of living a seemingly carefree life.
For everyone who related to Marianne from Normal People a little too much, The Idiot is a perfect next read. Selin also sees herself as an outsider as she starts her freshman year at Harvard. Selin has to navigate living away from home, new social dynamics and the ever-confusing reality of the situationship. Following her daily life in 1995 closely, the reader moves from the Harvard campus to her summer study abroad in France, Hungary and Turkey. At its core, The Idiot speaks to a similar struggle to many of Rooney’s books as Selin tries to find a comfortable spot in her newly minted adulthood.
