This Must Be the Place
The Sunday Times Bestseller from the Author of Hamnet
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4.1 • 8 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The Sunday Times no. 3 bestselling novel from author of HAMNET and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT
*Over 330,000 copies sold*
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award
'A complex, riveting novel of love and hope that grips at the heart' The Sunday Times
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A reclusive former film star living in the wilds of Ireland, Claudette Wells thinks nothing of firing a gun if strangers get too close to her house. Why is she so fiercely protective of her family, and what made her walk out on her career at the height of her fame?
Her husband Daniel, reeling from a discovery about a woman he last saw twenty years ago, is about to make an exit of his own. It is a journey that will send him off-course, far from home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
This Must Be The Place crosses continents and time zones, creating a portrait of an extraordinary marriage, the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart.
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'Moving and hilarious. I loved it' Rachel Joyce
'A tour de force. Dazzling' Observer
'A conjuror's sleight of hand... deft and compelling' Guardian
'Magnificent... perceptive, profound and page-turning in equal measures' Cathy Rentzenbrink
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Maggie O’Farrell has rarely created a character as enigmatic and fascinating as Claudette Wells: a global film star, wife and muse of a garlanded Swedish filmmaker. Notoriously hot-tempered, Claudette is the star of This Must be the Place…except she’s not really present. It’s her bizarre disappearance that drives this fascinating story, as O’Farrell lines up a series of varyingly trustworthy friends and lovers to pick apart Claudette’s vanishing act. O’Farrell’s humour and clever weaving together of narratives meant we were hungrily racing to discover Claudette’s fate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Farrell (The Vainishing Act of Esme Lennox) spins a magical story in her new novel. On the surface, the story is about the unlikely meeting of Daniel, an American, and Claudette, a French-English former actress; the life they make together; the lives they lived before that. and their struggle to hold things together in the face of a secret from Daniel's past. But this description, though accurate, doesn't convey the depth of perception and detail. O'Farrell offers not just backstory, but surround-story, using first-, second- and third-person points of view to depict Daniel and Claudette's children, Daniel's mother, Claudette's brother and his wife, an ex-lover or two, a former friend, a bewildered assistant, and a woman Daniel meets by chance in the Bolivian high plains (who has her own story of betrayal). Across the present and the recent and more distant pasts, in Donegal, Ireland; Brooklyn; London; Sussex, England; and points south and east, relationships start, end, and last. 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.
