Instructions for a Heatwave

O'Farrell, Maggie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0755358791 ISBN 13: 9780755358793

Publisher: Tinder Press, 2013

A story of a dysfunctional but deeply loveable family reunited, set during the legendary summer of 1976, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE by Maggie O'Farrell was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller.

It's July 1976. In London, it hasn't rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he's going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn't come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta's children - two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce - 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.

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)

Book Description:

An unforgettable portrait of an Irish family in crisis in the legendary heatwave of 1976