Instructions for a Heatwave: The bestselling novel from the prize-winning author of THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT and HAMNET

Maggie O'Farrell

Feb 2013 · Hachette UK

About this ebook

The summer read of 2023 from the bestselling author of HAMNET and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT

'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
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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.

Ratings and reviews

Bit disappointed by the ending

Ok. Easy read.

Ok funny ending

About the author

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of HAMNET, Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include 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 2010 Costa Novel Award, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize. She is also the author of two books for children, WHERE SNOW ANGELS GO and THE BOY WHO LOST HIS SPARK. She lives in Edinburgh.