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. 

A nameless woman is driven mad by enforced confinement after the birth of her child. Isolated in a colonial mansion and craving intellectual stimulation, she secretly begins to write. Ordered to her bedroom, the tortuous pattern of the wallpaper invades the recesses of her mind.

Product Description: Lexie Sinclair yearns for more than her parents' genteel country life. She makes her way to the city, where she meets a magazine editor, Innes, a man unlike any she has ever imagined. He introduces her to the thrilling world of bohemian postwar London, and Lexie learns to become a reporter, to know art and artists, to live fully, unconventionally, and with deep love...read more

Product Description: Iris Lockhart is busy tending to the everyday business of her vintage clothing shop and her complicated love affairs when she receives a stunning phone call. Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never even knew existed, is being released from a psychiatric hospital where she has been locked away for over sixty years...read more

Product Description: Maggie O'Farrell's captivating and critically acclaimed gothic tale of family secrets and the irrepressible freedom that truth brings   Chic and independent, Iris Lockhart is tending to her vintage-clothing shop in Edinburgh (and evading her married boyfriend) when she receives a stunning phone call: her great-aunt Esme—whom she never knew existed—is being released from Cauldstone Hospital, where she has been locked away for more than sixty years...read more

Product Description: A compulsive tale of betrayal and its impact upon a group of flatmates and lovers, Maggie O'Farrell's second novel does not disappoint. With the sensuality, passion and emotional acuteness which characterised her debut, she has written a gripping exploration of the ambivalence at the heart of intimate relationships, a keenly observed portrayal of shifting metropolitan lives and a superbly imagined story of a haunting...read more

Product Description: Set largely between Hong Kong and the Scottish Highlands, Maggie O'Farrell's third novel is a story about family and emigration - and the way you can never escape your family, or their history, no matter how far you travel. Stella - spirited, witty and passionate - has fled London to confront the childhood secret which has marked her life, and twinned her destiny with her sister's...read more

When a young woman named Alice Raikes slips into a coma following an accident that could have been a suicide attempt, her family gathers at her bedside to wait and to recall her life and loves. A first novel.