
<span style="">THE GLOBAL #1 BESTSELLER</span><br><span style=""><br></span><br><span style="">AN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY</span><br><span style=""><br></span><br><span style="">A 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</span><br><span style=""><br></span><br><span style="">'I read it in a state of rapture.' SUNDAY TIMES</span><br><span style="">'A tender, funny page-turner.' OBSERVER</span><br><span style="">'Come for the romance, stay for the meaning of life.' IRISH TIMES</span><br><span style="">'A breathtakingly intimate look at love and desire in its many different forms.' RED</span><br><span style=""><br></span><br><span style="">From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family.</span><br><span style=""><br></span><br><span style="">Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.</span><br><span style=""><br></span><br><span style="">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.</span><br><span style=""><br></span><br><span style="">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.</span><br><span style=""><br></span><br><span style="">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.</span><br>