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 thirtiessuccessful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their fathers death, hes medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women.

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.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interludea period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.