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How long does it take to read Intermezzo?

Sally Rooney

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney takes about 8 hours 19 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 8 hours 19 minutes

A week or two of reading

First published 2024. 454 pages, about 124,850 words.

17 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 13 hours 52 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 8 hours 19 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 5 hours 12 minutes

The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

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.

Subjects: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Grief, Brotherhood

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