Instructions for a Heat Wave

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.