Two brothers-one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy-work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each otherTen years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers' relationship widen. "Complete oddball" Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she's best at-sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues-with newer moves. Having the book's protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter's point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: "Must wonder what he's really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.") The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself-he's no match for the indelible Ivan-so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement (after Beautiful World, Where Are You). After their father dies, brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek drift further apart. Peter, 32, is a depressed Dublin lawyer torn between his college girlfriend, Sylvia, who broke up with him with after she suffered a disabling accident six years earlier, and 23-year-old Naomi, a sometime sex worker. Ivan, 22, is a socially inept pro chess player whose wunderkind status is in doubt when he meets and falls for 36-year-old near-divorcée Margaret at a tournament. Peter’s reflexive disapproval of the age gap in Ivan and Margaret’s relationship causes a permanent rift, and Rooney crosscuts between their perspectives as they ruminate on their father’s death and their complicated romances. The novel’s deliberate pacing veers from the propulsiveness of Normal People and the deep character work contrasts with the topicality of Beautiful World, but in many ways this feels like Rooney’s most fully realized work, especially as she channels the modernist styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Underlining Peter’s rudderlessness, she writes, “Lamplight. Walking her to the library under the trees. Live again one day of that life and die. Cold wind in his eyes stinging like tears. Woman much missed.” Moreover, her focus on Peter and Ivan’s complicated fraternal bond pays enormous dividends. Even the author’s skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel’s forceful currents of feeling. (Sept.)