Instructions for a Heatwave
Maggie O'Farrell, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345804716
Summary
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 Maggie O'Farrell 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.
- Aoife, the youngest, now living in Manhattan, a smart, immensely resourceful young woman who has arranged her entire life to conceal a devastating secret.
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. (From the publisher.)