7 Of The Best Books Like Intermezzo By Sally Rooney

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“To be in the presence of her intellect: lifted into finer air. Still feels that way. Admires her in that way still, beauty of her mind.”

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If you loved Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, you’re not alone. Rooney’s exquisitely moving story of love, grief, and family resonates with readers who adore emotionally rich, character-driven novels. In Intermezzo, the lives of two grieving brothers and the people they love intertwine with intensity, exploring despair, desire, and the fragile possibilities of human connection. Fans of Rooney’s books often search for novels that capture the same introspective tone, complex relationships, and contemporary realism. Join us today at What We Reading for the best books like Intermezzo – literary fiction that delves into love, loss, and family with honesty and emotional depth. Whether it’s stories of intense love, nuanced family dynamics, or introspective characters tackling life’s challenges, these novels are perfect if you love Sally Rooney. 

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Intermezzo Summary

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 twenty-two years old and a competitive chess player. He has always viewed 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 rapidly become 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 how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking. 

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Conversations With Friends – Sally Rooney

We’re kicking off our list of the best books like Intermezzo with another one of Sally Rooney’s best novels, Conversations with Friends. Frances is a sharply cool, darkly observant twenty-one-year-old college student. She devotes herself to a life of the mind and to the beautiful Bobbi, her best friend. Lovers at school, the women now perform spoken-word poetry in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. 

Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home, as well as her tall, handsome husband. Nick is a bored actor who never lived up to his potential. However amusing their flirtation seemed at first, it soon gave way to a strange intimacy neither of them expected. Written with the same precision and intelligence as Intermezzo, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth. 

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Check Out The Best Books Like Conversations With Friends

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Exciting Times – Naoise Dolan

Ava moved to Hong Kong to find happiness, but so far, it isn’t working out. Since she left Dublin, she’s been spending her days teaching English to rich children, and her nights avoiding petulant roommates in her cramped apartment. When Ava befriends Julian, a witty British banker, he offers a shortcut into a lavish life her meagre salary could never afford. The pair strike up a relationship, but Julian’s job soon takes him back to London, leaving Ava unsure where they stand. 

Enter Edith. A Hong Kong-born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Ava wants to be her – and wants her. When Julian announces he is returning to Hong Kong, however, she faces a fork in the road. Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is a book similar to Intermezzo about the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. 

The Idiot – Elif Batuman

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she’s never heard of, befriends her charismatic Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older student from Hungary. Sen may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with every email exchanged, the act of writing seems to take on strange, mysterious meanings. 

At the end of the year, Ivan returns to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside. On the way, she spends two weeks in Paris with Svetlana. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming-to-grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. 

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Outline – Rachel Cusk

A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers she meets talk of their loves, ambitions, pains, anxieties, and perceptions of their daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city, the sequence of voices begins to weave a complex human tapestry. 

The more they talk, the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is another book like Intermezzo about self-expression, about the desire to create, and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form. 

Lessons – Ian McEwan

When the world is still counting the cost of WWII and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines’ life is upended. Two thousand miles from his mother’s protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. 

Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. He begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the remainder of his life. Epic and deeply humane like Intermezzo, Lessons by Ian McEwan is a chronicle of our times – a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man’s lifetime. 

Swimming Lessons – Claire Fuller

Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but, instead of giving them to him, she hides them in thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter, she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan. 

Twelve years later, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window. But he’s getting older, and this unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed her mother drowned, returns home to care for her father and to work out what really happened to Ingrid. But what Flora doesn’t realise is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. 

A Separation – Katie Kitamura

Another one of the best books like Intermezzo, A Separation by Katie Kitamura, opens with a young woman agreeing with her faithless husband that it’s time to separate. For the moment, it’s a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece. She reluctantly agrees to go and search for him. Adrift in the wild landscape, she traces the disintegration of their relationship and discovers that she understands less than she thought about the man she used to love. 

A story on intimacy and infidelity, A Separation is about the gulf that divides us from the lives of others, and the narratives we create for ourselves. As the narrator reflects upon her love for a man who may never have been what he appeared, Kitamura propels readers into the experience of a woman on the brink of catastrophe.