Instructions for a Heatwave
The bestselling novel from the prize-winning author of THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT and HAMNET
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4.1 • 51 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The summer read of 2023 from the bestselling author of HAMNET and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT
'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
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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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Gretta Riordan's husband, Robert, disappears during the 1976 London heatwave, her three grown children return home for the first time in years. All are dealing with personal crises that inform their relationships with each other and are tied back to their family history. The oldest, Michael Francis, is trying to keep his marriage together as his wife yearns for independence, and his two sisters, Monica and Aoife, have been estranged for years over a bitter secret that led Aoife across the ocean to New York, where she has made a life for herself while hiding her illiteracy. Under the stress of searching for their father and enduring the unbearable heat which causes people to "act not so much out of character but deep within it" the siblings and their mother are forced to confront old resentments which bubble to the surface. O'Farrell skillfully navigates between past and present, as family secrets are revealed and old grudges are hashed out, without ever losing the narrative's pace. An absorbing read from start to finish, through O'Farrell's vibrant prose, each character comes alive as more is revealed and the novel unfolds.
