The star novelist discusses her public persona, the discourse around her work and why reinvention isn’t a goal.

Rooney excels at creating an authentic experience of striving within a frenetic, ever changing world. With her sociopolitical and emotional intelligence, Rooney raises the question: is there ethical heterosexuality under late capitalism and imminent climate collapse?

In recent years, Irish author Sally Rooney, 33, has been considered a wunderkind of the literary world, thanks to the breakout success of 2017’s Conversations with Friends, 2018’s Normal People and 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.

But novelists as talented as Ms Rooney aspire to do something new. They must negotiate the twin dangers of staleness and self-indulgent experiment. “Intermezzo” is the story of Ivan and Peter Koubek.

Though a casual reader (or dismisser) of Rooney might think all her books are the same, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, Rooney’s previous novel, was itself an experiment, with a dual narration style departing from its more straightforward predecessors.

She has been called ‘the voice of a generation’ – an adage she reportedly hates. Either way, Sally Rooney seems to have ditched her typical exploration of ennui-plagued love-lorn millennials for Intermezzo: A Novel,