Instructions for a Heat Wave - Hardcover

O'Farrell, Maggie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385349408 ISBN 13: 9780385349406

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2013

Synopsis

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 bestsellerThe 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 years: 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.

About this title

Product Description

Rare Book

Review

The Riordans will stay in your mind long after you finish this book. They're funny, infuriating and impossible not to love. They feel like family (Irish Times)

My favourite kind of novel: big-hearted, psychologically complex and utterly gripping (Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette)

Unputdownable (Joanna Briscoe, Guardian)

Instantly appealing...magical (Daily Telegraph)

Masterful...holds you on an exquisite knife-edge (Marie Claire)

An author at the top of her game (Sunday Express)

O'Farrell's language is lissom, airborne, mostly seamless, her characters flawed, contradictory, aggravating and instantly knowable. This is a deceptively easy, effortlessly true-feeling novel; a total delight (Metro)

A quite wonderful novel...at once enthralling, page turning and atmospheric (Irish Examiner)

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0385349408
• ISBN 13: 9780385349406
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 289