Books like
Intermezzo

Normal People is still the closest match for Intermezzo, and the one to read first if you want more Rooney. Both novels follow a relationship shaped by power imbalances, class differences and people who struggle to say what they want from each other. Intermezzo splits its focus between two brothers, while Normal People stays on Connell and Marianne as they circle each other from school through university.

The writing works in the same register: precise, emotionally loaded sentences that reveal character through what goes unsaid. If you connected with Ivan's social awkwardness, you will spot Connell's painful self-consciousness right away. Marianne's sharp intelligence recalls the way Rooney writes women who see through social performance.

The Sligo setting and the Dublin university scenes share Intermezzo's sense of how place shapes Irish identity. Both books treat sex as a place of vulnerability, not spectacle. Both also choose an honest, unresolved ending over a tidy one.

Read this one if the money and power running under Rooney's love stories is what grabs you. Naoise Dolan's debut, Exciting Times, shares Intermezzo's interest in young people working out what kinds of relationships are open to them outside the usual structures. Ava, a 22-year-old Irish woman teaching English in Hong Kong, gets involved with a British banker and then a local lawyer.

The novel tracks how money and power shape every exchange between them. Like Rooney, Dolan writes in clipped, plain sentences that make you read between the lines. The love triangle mirrors Peter's situation in Intermezzo, where he cannot commit to one person because each relationship meets a different need.

Dolan also shares Rooney's ease with characters who think about politics and capitalism as naturally as they think about attraction. The expat setting adds a layer of displacement that echoes Intermezzo's characters, who all feel slightly out of place in their own lives. It is a strong pick if you love Rooney's spare prose and her eye for how economics gets into the bedroom.

Here is the warm, funny pick, for readers who loved the closeness of Intermezzo's brothers and want it in a friendship. Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident is set in Cork during the 2008 financial crisis. Rachel and her best friend James share a flat, crushes and the slow-motion chaos of being young and broke in Ireland. Their friendship has the same intensity Intermezzo gives to brotherhood, where your closest bond becomes the lens for everything else.

O'Donoghue writes with a warmth and wit that Rooney often holds at arm's length, but both know how money worries shape emotional choices. Rachel's entanglement with a married professor echoes the age-gap love in Intermezzo. In both books, the power gap between partners becomes a character of its own. The Cork and London settings ground the story in specific Irish experiences of emigration and return.

Intermezzo uses place the same way, to mark its characters' emotional states. If you love Rooney's dialogue, you will find O'Donoghue's conversations just as natural.

If the brothers' grief was what held you, Coco Mellors' Blue Sisters is the most direct match on this list. Intermezzo follows two brothers processing their father's death, and here three surviving sisters scatter after the death of the fourth. Each one handles the loss through her own self-destructive pattern: addiction, overwork or emotional withdrawal.

The rotating points of view mirror the way Intermezzo moves between Peter and Ivan. Both books show how the same family event sets off an entirely different crisis in each person. Mellors writes addiction and recovery with a specificity that recalls Rooney's handling of Peter's substance use, never moralizing but never looking away.

The New York, London and Los Angeles settings give Blue Sisters a more cosmopolitan reach than Rooney's Irish scenes. Still, both novels argue that family bonds hold even when the people involved can barely stand to be in the same room. This is the one to read if you want to stay with sibling bonds and loss.

Came to Intermezzo first? Rooney's own Beautiful World, Where Are You is the turning point in her writing that led to it. It follows two best friends, Alice and Eileen, as they work through new relationships, creative ambition and the guilt of living comfortably while the world falls apart.

Their email exchanges give the novel an intellectual side that Intermezzo strips away. Both books still ask the same central question: can private happiness be justified in a broken world? Alice's relationship with Felix, a warehouse worker, carries the class tension that runs through all of Rooney's work.

Eileen's on-again, off-again connection with Simon has the same exhausting intimacy as Peter's relationships in Intermezzo. The book gives you the wider context for Rooney's ongoing project of writing about young, educated people trying to live ethically while wanting badly to be loved. The Mayo setting adds a rural side that connects to Intermezzo's scenes outside Dublin.

Pick this one if you want to sit with the long aftermath of family trouble, told with more warmth than Rooney allows. Ann Napolitano's Hello Beautiful is a decades-spanning family saga about four sisters in Chicago. Like Intermezzo, it cares about how one family event can fracture relationships for years.

When William, who marries the eldest Padavano sister, suffers a breakdown, the fallout reshapes every relationship in the family. The novel refuses to assign blame neatly and shows how love and resentment live side by side in families. Napolitano lets her characters have the full reconciliation scenes Rooney might cut short, but both know that family wounds heal slowly and leave scars.

Because it spans generations, it moves at a different pace from Intermezzo's short timeline, but the payoff is the same. Chicago is drawn with care. Each sister's point of view reveals a different version of shared events, much like Intermezzo's dual narration.

Go back to the beginning with this one if you want to trace how Rooney's thinking about intimacy and power has grown. Her debut, Conversations with Friends, is still the sharpest version of her interest in how friendships, affairs and political beliefs tangle together. Frances, a 21-year-old poet in Dublin, gets involved with an older married couple, Melissa and Nick, and desire upends every certainty she holds.

The affair at its center points straight ahead to Intermezzo, where people also try to build something real outside the usual rules. Rooney's prose is at its most restrained here. Frances narrates in a flat, watchful tone that hides how much she feels.

The push and pull between Frances and her ex-girlfriend Bobbi is the kind of intense, competitive friendship Intermezzo turns into brotherhood. Dublin is as much a character as any person. The arts-world setting is full of social performance, a bit like Peter's life as a barrister in Intermezzo.

Elif Batuman's The Idiot is the novel to reach for when you want Rooney's blend of cleverness and yearning at full length. Selin, a Turkish-American freshman at Harvard in the mid-1990s, falls into a maddening email correspondence with an older mathematics student named Ivan. She follows that half-formed feeling all the way to a summer teaching English in the Hungarian countryside.

Batuman writes the same kind of overthinking, self-aware narrator Rooney gives her chess-prodigy brother Ivan. It is a mind that picks every interaction apart and still cannot decide what it wants. The romance never resolves cleanly, which is the point.

Both books treat thinking as its own form of suffering. Deadpan humor cuts the ache on every page, and the interior voice stretches across a whole year of unrequited attention.

If you want Intermezzo's quiet ache turned all the way up, this is the book. Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life is the maximalist counterweight to Rooney's restraint, and the two share more than their length difference suggests. Four college friends move to New York and build careers.

Over hundreds of pages, the novel narrows onto Jude, a brilliant litigator carrying a childhood so damaged he cannot accept the love offered to him. Rooney studies two brothers circling each other after a father's death, while Yanagihara studies a chosen family circling a wound none of them can heal. Both books ask the same hard question: can the people who love you reach you when you have decided you do not deserve it?

The emotional intensity runs hotter here. Still, the focus on male tenderness and the slow buildup of feeling will land for the same readers.

This is the closest American cousin to what Rooney does, a contained character study that lives almost entirely inside one person's head. Brandon Taylor's Real Life follows Wallace, a queer Black biochemistry student at a Midwestern university, through a single late-summer weekend after his father's death. He fields the small cruelties of his mostly white friend group.

He also falls into an unexpected entanglement with a man who calls himself straight. Taylor writes the same close, watchful interiority Rooney brings to her brothers, catching every social slight and every flicker of wanting. The plot is small on purpose, built from dinners, lab benches and a tennis court.

The feeling underneath it is enormous. Both books understand how grief, desire and the pressure of belonging tangle together. Read it for a precise, aching weekend in one consciousness.