Maggie O'Farrell

A story of a dysfunctional but deeply loveable family reunited, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE already feels like a contemporary classic. It was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award. 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.

Instructions for a Heatwave

Sarah Escorsa

I knew that this wasn’t a book for me. I almost never read family dramas and only decided to give this one a try because my friend Linda loved it so much. I really tried to like this book and to get into it but I just couldn’t. I think I now know for a fact that family dramas are not my thing.

I don’t mind Maggie O’Farrell or her writing; it’s just that I find the whole thing boring. I wasn’t interested in the characters from the very beginning and just couldn’t care less what happened to them as the story developed. Oh well, that’s my own fault and it has nothing to do with the quality of the book. This will serve as a reminder to stick to the genres I like in the future!

Alexia

An unexpected 4.5 stars. 
Review to come.

Elena Garcia Navarro

This book was impossible to put down.

I'm a sucker for books about dysfunctional families, the more dysfunctional the better, and this novel totally provided. 

In this novel we follow the Riordans, an Irish-born London-based family in the heatwave of 1976. When the father disappears mysteriously the three siblings will be force to get together after years of being apart, and with their mum's help, try to find out where their dad has gone, voluntarily or not and what exactly prompted his disappearance. 

I truly love when we get a group of flesh out characters leading their own lives, each with their worries and responsibilities but who will do everything for each other if the situation arises. If you throw in there a couple of long well-kept secrets and some old grudges and open wounds and make them work it out, I call it a perfect recipe. This novel touched all my buttons. I loved getting to know these characters, their stories and eccentricities, the different dynamics between each other, the love they share which can clearly be perceived jumping of the page. I loved how everything unravelled and the ending perfectly wrapped up this charming story, there's nothing I would have done different. 

Maggie O'Farrell is the queen of these "urban" novels, she writes characters that you certainly believe are real people, so human-like you forgive them for all their flaws. The writing style was beautiful and I really enjoyed how the author interlaced the events happening in the present with the different character's recollections of the past. 

I really can't wait to read everything this author has ever written.

Sophisticated, intelligent, impossible to put down, Maggie O’Farrell’s beguiling novels—After You’d Gone, winner of a Betty Trask Award; The Distance Between Us, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Hand That First Held Mine, winner of the Costa Novel Award; and her unforgettable bestseller The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox—blend richly textured psychological drama with page-turning suspense. Instructions for a Heatwave finds her at the top of her game, with a novel about a family crisis set during the legendary British heatwave of 1976. Gretta Riordan wakes on a stultifying July morning to find that her husband of forty years has gone to get the paper and vanished, cleaning out his bank account along the way. Gretta’s three grown children converge on their parents’ home for the first time in years: Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing; Monica, with two stepdaughters who despise her and a blighted past that has driven away the younger sister she once adored; and Aoife, the youngest, now living in Manhattan, a smart, immensely resourceful young woman who has arranged her entire life to conceal a devastating secret. Maggie O’Farrell writes with exceptional grace and sensitivity about marriage, about the mysteries that inhere within families, and the fault lines over which we build our lives—the secrets we hide from the people who know and love us best. In a novel that stretches from the heart of London to New York City’s Upper West Side to a remote village on the coast of Ireland, O’Farrell paints a bracing portrait of a family falling apart and coming together with hard-won, life-changing truths about who they really are. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Instructions for a Heatwave

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