From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family.
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.
'This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I'm not alone.' - Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram) WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PFD YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2018 A SUNDAY TIMES , OBSERVER AND TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and observant. A student in Dublin and an aspiring writer, at night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are interviewed and then befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence, beginning a complex menage-a-quatre. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, the sharply witty and emotion-averse Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.
