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Instructions for a Heatwave

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780755358793

Price: £9.99

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A story of a dysfunctional but deeply loveable family reunited, set during the legendary summer of 1976, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE by Maggie O’Farrell was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller (2013).

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.

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Reviews

The Riordans will stay in your mind long after you finish this book. They're funny, infuriating and impossible not to love. They feel like family
Irish Times
My favourite kind of novel: big-hearted, psychologically complex and utterly gripping
Maria Semple, author of <i>Where'd You Go, Bernadette<i>
Unputdownable
Joanna Briscoe, <i>Guardian</i>
Instantly appealing...magical
Daily Telegraph
Masterful...holds you on an exquisite knife-edge
Marie Claire
An author at the top of her game
Sunday Express
O'Farrell's language is lissom, airborne, mostly seamless, her characters flawed, contradictory, aggravating and instantly knowable. This is a deceptively easy, effortlessly true-feeling novel; a total delight
Metro
A quite wonderful novel...at once enthralling, page turning and atmospheric
Irish Examiner
An accomplished debut that excellently conveys the experience of being deaf in a hearing world. A Sign of Her Own gives a fascinating insight into a moment in history when the invention of the telephone was poised to connect countless people, yet deaf communities were being silenced by a movement against the use of sign language. Beautifully written, absorbing and illuminating
Priscilla Morris, author of Black Butterflies