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 week's book is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney and we'll be meeting at Ye Olde Cocke on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.