Synopses & Reviews
"Maggie O’Farrell is a hugely gifted, sympathetic, and ambitious writer, and This Must Be the Place deserves to be her breakout book." Richard Russo
A dazzling novel from best-selling writer Maggie O’Farrell, winner of the Costa Novel Award—an irresistible love story that crisscrosses continents and time zones as it captures an extraordinary marriage, and an unforgettable family, with wit, humor, and deep affection.
Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex–film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway. Claudette was once the most glamorous and infamous woman in cinema before she staged her own disappearance and retreated to blissful seclusion in an Irish farmhouse.
But the life Daniel and Claudette have so carefully constructed is about to be disrupted by an unexpected discovery about a woman Daniel lost touch with twenty years ago. This revelation will send him off-course, far away from wife, children, and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
This Must Be the Place is a novel about family, identity, and true love: an intimately drawn portrait of a marriage, both the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart. O’Farrell writes with complexity, insight, and laugh-out-loud humor in a narrative that hurtles forward with powerful velocity and emotion. This Must Be the Place is a sophisticated, spellbinding summer read from one of the UK’s most highly acclaimed and best-loved novelists.
Review
"Her most ambitious novel to date, crisscrossing the Atlantic and three decades, and told from multiple perspectives, This Must Be the Place is one of the summer’s most anticipated reads." Sunday Times (UK)
Review
"Stylistically, narratively, emotionally, This Must Be the Place is a tour de force, a complex and nuanced story leaping effortlessly across multiple characters, continents and time frames….This Must Be The Place is a rare literary beast: both technically dazzling and deeply moving. It has all the structural and temporal playfulness of a Kate Atkinson novel while retaining the hallmark of emotional intensity for which O’Farrell has become renowned. It is her best novel to date, a book that surely confirms her as one of the UK’s most assured, accomplished and inventive storytellers." The Guardian
Review
"The scenario is glamorous, the writing is stylish, the globe-trotting almost dizzying, but there’s a satisfying core of untampered feeling as well…juicy and cool, this could be O'Farrell’s U.S. breakthrough book." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"Inventing, moving, and hilarious. I loved it." Rachel Joyce, best-selling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Synopsis
An irresistible love story, an unforgettable family. Best-selling author Maggie O Farrell captures an extraordinary marriage with insight and laugh-out-loud humor in what Richard Russo calls her breakout book. Perfect for readers of Where d You Go, Bernadette.
Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway. Claudette was once the most glamorous and infamous woman in cinema before she staged her own disappearance and retreated to blissful seclusion in an Irish farmhouse.
But the life Daniel and Claudette have so carefully constructed is about to be disrupted by an unexpected discovery about a woman Daniel lost touch with twenty years ago. This revelation will send him off-course, far away from wife, children, and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
O Farrell s prose manages to be both intimate and expansive and keenly perceptive in its insights about the complexities of marriage. Beautiful and bittersweet, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE will make O Farrell s longtime fans swoon while prompting new readers to wonder why they ve only just discovered her.
--BookPage
I have been a huge fan of Maggie O Farrell s novels for years. She writes with tremendous clarity and poise and in THIS MUST BE THE PLACE you are invested in what happens to Daniel and Claudette from the moment you meet them. A joy to read.
--Jane Green
Inventive, moving, and hilarious.I loved it.
Rachel Joyce, best-selling author ofThe Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
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About the Author
Maggie O'Farrell is the author of six previous novels, After You’d Gone; My Lover’s Lover; The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox; The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the Costa Novel Award; and Instructions for a Heatwave, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award. She lives in Edinburgh.
Maggie O'Farrell on PowellsBooks.Blog
“How do you manage to write with small children?” This is the question I’m asked most often at public readings, usually with an expression of bemusement or sometimes suspicion, as if I’m concealing a phalanx of secret nannies behind my front door. My answer amounts to a mumble about utilizing evenings and nap-times, so I decided it was high time I write a more detailed description of what it’s like and how I do it...
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