Instructions for a Heatwave - Paperback

by Maggie O'Farrell (Author)

An unforgettable narrative--from the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet--of a family falling apart and coming together with hard-won, life-changing truths about who they really are.

"Strange weather brings out strange behavior." London, 1976. In the thick of a record-breaking heatwave, Gretta Riordan's newly retired husband has cleaned out his bank account and vanished. Now, for the first time in years, Gretta calls her children home: Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing; Monica, whose blighted past has driven a wedge between her and her younger sister; and Aoife, the youngest, whose new life in Manhattan is elaborately arranged to conceal a devastating secret.

In a story that stretches from the Upper West Side to a village on the coast of Ireland, Maggie O'Farrell explores the mysteries that inhere within families, and reveals the fault lines over which we build our lives.

Author Biography

MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.