Maggie O'Farrell

A spell-binding novel of two women connected across fifty years by art, love, betrayals, secrets, and motherhood.

The Hand that First Held Mine

A gorgeously written story of love and motherhood, this is a tour de force from one of our most acclaimed and best loved novelists. When the bohemian, sophisticated Innes Kent turns up by chance on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realises she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life for herself, with Innes at her side. In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child. Elina, a painter, struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with sense of herself as an artist, and Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood, memories that don't tally with his parents' version of events. As Ted begins to search for answers, so an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed, separated by fifty years, but connected in ways that neither could ever have expected.

Elena Garcia Navarro

Slightly disappointed with this one. The previous two novels I read by O'Farrell were both 5 stars but this one was lacking something and I kept waiting for it to grab my attention which never happened. I kind of had to force myself to keep picking it up and finish it.

There were some aspects that I enjoyed such as the two strong female leads (even though I quite enjoyed one of stories quite a lot more than the other), the emphasis and importance of art throughout the book and the beautiful writing style. However, I went into this novel with the wrong expectations since I thought both characters would eventually meet and influence each other which was not how the story played out. Also, the ending felt deeply unsatisfactory, really abrupt and the characters and the reader got no closure from what we just learn at the end of the novel. 

I will 100% continue reading books by this author but this just wasn´t my cup of tea.

Lexie Sinclair is plotting an extraordinary life for herself. Hedged in by her parents' genteel country life, she plans her escape to London. There, she takes up with Innes Kent, a magazine editor who wears duck-egg blue ties and introduces her to the thrilling, underground world of bohemian, post-war Soho. She learns to be a reporter, to know art and artists, to embrace her life fully and with a deep love at the center of it. She creates many lives--all of them unconventional. And when she finds herself pregnant, she doesn't hesitate to have the baby on her own. Later, in present-day London, a young painter named Elina dizzily navigates the first weeks of motherhood. She doesn't recognize herself: she finds herself walking outside with no shoes; she goes to the restaurant for lunch at nine in the morning; she can't recall the small matter of giving birth. But for her boyfriend, Ted, fatherhood is calling up lost memories, with images he cannot place. As Ted's memories become more disconcerting and more frequent, it seems that something might connect these two stories-- these two women-- something that becomes all the more heartbreaking and beautiful as they all hurtle toward its revelation. Here Maggie O'Farrell brings us a spellbinding novel of two women connected across fifty years by art, love, betrayals, secrets, and motherhood. Like her acclaimed The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, it is a "breathtaking, heart-breaking creation."* And it is a gorgeous inquiry into the ways we make and unmake our lives, who we know ourselves to be, and how even our most accidental legacies connect us. *The Washington Post Book World

The Hand that First Held Mine

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