Instructions for a Heatwave

2015 Longlist

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 wih 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.

(From Publisher)

About the Author

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.

Librarian’s Comments

A story about family relationships set in the 1970s.