THE GLOBAL #1 BESTSELLERAN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURYA BEST BOOK OF 2024 IN THE GUARDIAN, TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, IRISH TIMES, LONDON STANDARD, INDEPENDENT, OBSERVER, NEW STATESMAN, iNEWS, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, THE SKINNY, CITY AM, DAILY MAIL, AND THE CONVERSATION'I read it in a state of rapture.' SUNDAY TIMES'A tender, funny pageturner.' OBSERVER'Come for the romance, stay for the meaning of life.' IRISH TIMES'A breathtakingly intimate look at love and desire in its many different forms.' REDFrom the author of the multimillioncopy 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 twentytwoyearold 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.
