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Instructions for a Heatwave: The Sunday Times Bestseller from the Author of Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell

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The stunning new novel from Costa-Novel-Award-winning novelist Maggie O'Farrell: a portrait of an Irish family in crisis in the legendary heatwave of 1976.

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 wih 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.

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Praise for Instructions for a Heatwave: The Sunday Times Bestseller from the Author of Hamnet

  • 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 TimesMy favourite kind of novel: big-hearted, psychologically complex and utterly grippingUnputdownableInstantly appealing...magical - Daily TelegraphMasterful...holds you on an exquisite knife-edge - Marie ClaireAn author at the top of her game - Sunday ExpressO'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 - MetroA quite wonderful novel...at once enthralling, page turning and atmospheric - Irish Examiner

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Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of HAMNET, Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include AFTER YOU'D GONE, MY LOVER'S LOVER, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize. She is also the author of three books for children, WHERE SNOW ANGELS GO, THE BOY WHO LOST HIS SPARK and WHEN THE STAMMER CAME TO STAY. She lives in Edinburgh.

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