Instructions for a Heatwave

By MAGGIE O’FARRELL

$36.99 RRP, 1 March 2013, Published by Hachette New Zealand

The stunning new novel from Costa-Novel-Award-winning novelist Maggie O'Farrell is a portrait of an Irish family in crisis in the legendary heatwave of 1976.

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.

About the Author

Maggie O'Farrell's sixth book is the work of an outstanding novelist at the height of her powers.

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of five 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, and The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She lives in Edinburgh.