This Must Be the Place (O'Farrell) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural," reads the epigraph to Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel—a quote from Louis MacNeice's poem Snow that might serve as an appetizer (or warning, depending on your proclivities) for what's to come. This Must Be the Place is an "incorrigibly plural" book, offering its story through a kaleidoscopic proliferation of points of view, fractured chronologies and geographical shifts. The result…is marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time…This wide-ranging novel has a vivid sense of play, despite its sometimes sober subject matter. Mostly, its experiments bear fruit.
Elizabeth Graver - New York Times Book Review

Compassionate.… Few contemporary writers equal Maggie O’Farrell’s gift for combining intricate, engrossing plots with full-bodied characterizations.
Washington Post


Extraordinary.… An engrossing novel…  from a writer of impressive, perhaps masterly, skills.
Washington Times


Intensely absorbing.… O’Farrell writes novels in which you can happily lose yourself.
NPR


[M]agical…. There is enough possibility and randomness for three books, yet the story never feels overstuffed, and when it ends, the reader is stunned and grateful, relieved that in the face of all that can go (and have gone) wrong, some things have come right.
Publishers Weekly


On holiday in Ireland to escape the stress of a terrible custody battle, young American professor Daniel Sullivan meets and falls in love with celebrated actress Claudette…. They end up living blissfully together …but a secret from Daniel's past won't stay put.
Library Journal


[A] sophisticated story about love [with] an interlocking series of narratives set from 1944 to 2016, in places ranging from Sussex to Goa to Brooklyn….  Juicy and cool, this could be O'Farrell's U.S. breakthrough book.
Kirkus Reviews