An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, 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. 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.