Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo (Faber), one of the most anticipated novels of the autumn, is published tomorrow (24th September) and was widely reviewed over the weekend. Johanna Thomas-Corr, writing in the Sunday Times, called Intermezzo the author’s “most mature and moving book to date” and hailed the novel as “a departure for Rooney, who has evolved from a writer of dialogue-driven romance stories to richly layered, expansive novels about fractured families and people experimenting with unconventional relationship dynamics.”
In the Observer, Anthony Cummins described Intermezzo as “perfect—truly wonderful—a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements”. He posed the question: “Is there a better novelist at work right now? It matters not a jot to Intermezzo’s success but you have to wonder why it’s not up for the Booker—not even longlisted.”
Writing in the Guardian, Alexandra Harris noted “Intermezzo is an accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon. It’s also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger”. Cal Revely-Calder’s review for the Telegraph concluded: “For all the griefs and regrets in this novel, all the misreadings and mistakes, as the characters try to figure out what they feel, we never lose sight of their capacity for love. If Rooney’s work has a guiding belief, I think it’s something such as this: no one is ever truly alone.”
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In the New Statesman, Lola Seaton found “Intermezzo lacks the taut self-assurance of Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), but it is an honourable, tenacious and not unsuccessful attempt to go beyond them, and to leave—indeed to run some distance from—her formal comfort zone.” Shahida Bari, in the FT, praised Intermezzo as a “return to exceptional form” and a “keenly intelligent book about brothers, lovers, relationships and what it might mean to lean on others”. Intermezzo was the September Book of the Month in The Bookseller, with fiction previewer Madeleine Feeny praising a “lyrical story of fraternal friction, emotional crisis and unexpected love” which “interrogates the significance of romantic age gaps and relationship norms against a backdrop of societal judgement, overturning readers’ expectations alongside those of its characters”.
With the US election on the horizon, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig (Bodley Head) was reviewed by Justin Webb in the Times. The authors, both reporters for the New York Times, based the book on “dozens of interviews conducted over several years, confidential internal records from his time on the TV show ’The Apprentice’ and the decades of Trump family financial and tax records that they obtained for the New York Times.”
The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck by David Spiegelhalter (Penguin), the statistician and Cambridge University professor, was reviewed by John Naughton in the Observer: “Most of us (including journalists) are woefully ignorant about probability, chance and risk… Faced with such wilful blindness, most academics would have shrugged and returned to their rooms. Fortunately, Spiegelhalter is made of sterner stuff.”