This Must be the Place / Maggie O'Farrell

Fic

Paperback

From the bestselling, award-winning author of INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE and THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, comes an unforgettable story of a man seeking to come to terms with the death of a woman he loved thirty years ago. Daniel Sullivan, his wife and three children are en route to an airport when he happens to turn on the radio. A hush falls when Daniel hears a voice he has not heard for decades, and realises that the talented, unhappy woman it belonged to died shortly after he left her. What follows is Daniel's attempt to uncover the truth of how he came to walk away from his first love, with devastating consequences. But this is not his story alone, for his has been a complex life, and it is just as much that of the estranged children of his previous marriage, of his wife Claudette Wells, a reclusive former actress, and of the family they have raised in a stunning but remote rural Irish home. What emerges is a rich and extraordindarily intimate portrait of a unique marriage, one we become increasingly aware is being eaten away at by the slow, inevitable work of loss, and the reverberations of what happened between Daniel and a young woman named Nicola, all those years ago.