Instructions for a Heatwave
The Sunday Times Bestseller from the Author of Hamnet
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- 5,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
The Sunday Times top 10 bestselling summer read from author of HAMNET and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT
*Over 380,000 copies sold*
Shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award
'Addictive. Told with real humanity, warmth, and infectious love' Observer
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It's July 1976 and London is in the grip of a heatwave. It hasn't rained for months, the 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 may have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.
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'Superlative. A Mike Leigh-style extravaganza of reckonings and reconciliations' Vogue
'O'Farrell is hard to beat' Scotsman
'There is a deliciousness to this novel, a warmth and readability, that render it unputdownable' Guardian
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.
