AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller Short-listed for the An
Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year | Nominated for the DUBLIN Literary Award Named a
Best Book of the Year and a Critics ' Pick by The New York Times | Named an Essential Read by
The New Yorker | Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post Time Financial Times
Vogue The Guardian Harper's Bazaar Vox The Times (UK) Apple Books and more | A USA
Today People and Associated Press Top 10 Book of the Year | One of Barack Obama's favorite
books of 2024 | One of Chicago Public Library ' s Favorite Books of the Year An exquisitely
moving story about grief love and family-but especially love-from the global phenomenon Sally
Rooney. 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 thirties-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
twenty-two-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.
