Sophisticated, intelligent, impossible to put down, Maggie O'Farrell's beguiling novels blend richly textured psychological drama with page-turning suspense. Instructions for a Heatwave finds her at the top of her game, with a novel about a family crisis set during the legendary British heatwave of 1976.Sophisticated, intelligent, impossible to put down, Maggie O'Farrell's beguiling novels - After You'd Gone, winner of a Betty Trask Award; The Distance Between Us, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Hand That First Held Mine, winner of the Costa Novel Award; and her unforgettable bestseller The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - blend richly textured psychological drama with page-turning suspense. Instructions for a Heatwave finds her at the top of her game, with a novel about a family crisis set during the legendary British heatwave of 1976.Gretta Riordan wakes on a stultifying July morning to find that her husband of forty years has gone to get the paper and vanished, cleaning out his bank account along the way. Gretta's three grown children converge on their parents' home for the first time in Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing; Monica, with two stepdaughters who despise her and a blighted past that has driven away the younger sister she once adored; and Aoife, the youngest, now living in Manhattan, a smart, immensely resourceful young woman who has arranged her entire life to conceal a devastating secret.Maggie O'Farrell writes with exceptional grace and sensitivity about marriage, about the mysteries that inhere within families, and the fault lines over which we build our lives—the secrets we hide from the people who know and love us best. In a novel that stretches from the heart of London to New York City's Upper West Side to a remote village on the coast of Ireland, O'Farrell paints a bracing portrait of a family falling apart and coming together with hard-won, life-changing truths about who they really are.
It’s July 1976. In London, it hasn’t rained in months. Gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife, Gretta, that he is going around the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t return.
The search for Robert brings Gretta’s three children back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share. A journey back to Connemara, Ireland, brings surprises, insights, and revelations, as each confronts the knotty triangle of family life and love.
Elegant and compelling, Instructions for a Heatwave secures Maggie O’Farrell’s position as one of the best of the new generation of British writers.
