Sally Rooney's fourth novel is a study of grief and of the strange, abrasive love between two brothers who have little idea how to speak to each other. In the months after their father's death from cancer, Peter Koubek, a thirty-two-year-old Dublin barrister, and his younger brother Ivan, a socially awkward twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player, drift through their mourning in very different ways. Peter, outwardly polished and successful, is quietly unraveling, medicating himself to sleep and torn between Sylvia, the first love whose chronic pain ended their relationship's physical life, and Naomi, a much younger student living precariously. Ivan, meanwhile, meets Margaret, a divorced woman in her thirties who runs an arts centre in a small town in the west of Ireland, and the two begin an unlikely and tender relationship that Peter regards with suspicion.
Rooney alternates between the brothers' points of view and gives each a distinct texture: Peter's chapters are written in clipped, fragmented bursts of thought that echo the modernist interior monologue, while Ivan's are more patient and literal, reflecting his analytic, chess-shaped mind. The novel's title, borrowed from chess and music, gestures at an in-between state, a pause in a game or a life. Rooney's longstanding interest in power, class, and the ethics of intimacy remains, but here the emphasis shifts toward family, loss, and what it means to care for someone you find difficult. It is her longest and most emotionally expansive book, asking whether people can change, forgive, and build lives that make room for unconventional forms of love.