Ivan and Peter Koubek’s father has just died, but neither seems willing to talk much about it, let alone to one another. After all, it’s not like the two brothers are even friends.

Peter, the eldest by a decade, pities his awkward, 22-year-old brother, a competitive chess player whose prowess for the game hasn’t done much to build his social skills or self- esteem. But after meeting Margaret, an older woman who’s emerging from the shadow of her own crisis, Ivan’s life has begun to blossom — and the same cannot be said for Peter. A human-rights lawyer, Peter is self-medicating and can’t stop sabotaging his relationships.

The days after tragedy are often hard to navigate, and “Intermezzo,” the fourth novel from Irish author Sally Rooney, is a portrait of grief not fully internalized. Rooney wades through the convoluted emotions that follow tragedy: certainly heartache, but also relief and longing, guilt and joy, all on the cusp of transformation.

In sketching the contours of her characters, Rooney alternates between the perspectives. Her dialogue, characteristically bare and without quotation marks, lends a distinct musicality to her prose.

As Peter’s mind becomes untethered by pills, Rooney’s close third-person voice dances over the line of spoken and unspoken. Ivan meanwhile, follows the path of other stunted men, intelligently methodical yet rambling, grasping at emotions with insufficient words. These instances of almost are where Rooney shines. She teases out near-ruptured emotions never fully felt by the conscience.

This is often the meter of metamorphosis, the mundane swirl of emotions flirt past, illegible and unrealized until they inevitably burst, fully formed and so wholly overwhelming that they cannot be contained. And it is at this in-between, restrained and circumspect, where Rooney situates her novel — consider the title. Intermezzo, an unexpected move in chess that interrupts the typical sequence of exchanges, is a risk that upends the game’s perceived balance, raising the stakes.

In the tense, messy contradictions of communal grief, Rooney weaves together beautiful whole cloth. — Curtis Yee, Associated Press

Louis Bayard brings to life Constance Wilde in his witty and heartbreaking new novel, “The Wildes.”

Bayard has been doing great things with gay- centric versions of historical fiction for a couple of books now, namely “Jackie and Me” and “Courting Mr. Lincoln.” With “The Wildes,” he flips the narrative, portraying a famously gay person through the lens of the straight people in his life.

He opens with a famous love letter, written by Oscar Wilde to Constance in 1884. “(M)y soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some exquisite ecstasy with yours,” he writes.

Eight years later, the thrill is most definitely gone. In a long first section, styled as “Act One: Wildes in the Country,” the family of four is vacationing with Oscar’s mother and another couple in a farmhouse in the British countryside. “Tell me if I’ve met this one,” says Constance, reacting to word of an additional houseguest.

Unfortunately, this guest is Lord Alfred Douglas, the 20-something fop Wilde will destroy his life for. By the time we get to Act Two, set in Italy, the playwright has gone to jail, and Constance is having tea with the surgeon whose malpractice will leave her dead at 40.

Acts Three and Four follow the children, one of whom has a satisfying run-in with a poorly aged Douglas. Act Five is a charming fantasy version of what might have happened if Constance hadn’t stormed off from the farmhouse in 1892.

One can rarely pronounce with confidence about the emotional veracity of historical fiction, but as a woman who had married a gay man, I’ll say it anyway: Bayard has gotten it right. — Marion Winik, Minnesota Star Tribune