Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385349416
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
An unforgettable narrative—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet—of a family falling apart and coming together with hard-won, life-changing truths about who they really are. “Strange weather brings out strange behavior.” London, 1976. In the thick of a record-breaking heatwave, Gretta Riordan’s newly retired husband has cleaned out his bank account and vanished. Now, for the first time in years, Gretta calls her children home: Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing; Monica, whose blighted past has driven a wedge between her and her younger sister; and Aoife, the youngest, whose new life in Manhattan is elaborately arranged to conceal a devastating secret. In a story that stretches from the Upper West Side to a village on the coast of Ireland, Maggie O’Farrell explores the mysteries that inhere within families, and reveals the fault lines over which we build our lives.
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547487274
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
From the best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait comes a spellbinding novel of two women connected across fifty years by art, love, betrayals, secrets, and motherhood. "An exquisitely sensual tale of love, motherhood, and other forms of madness, The Hand That First Held Mine will unsettle, move, and haunt you." —Emma Donoghue, author of Room Lexie Sinclair is plotting an extraordinary life for herself. Hedged in by her parents' genteel country life, she plans her escape to London. There, she takes up with Innes Kent, a magazine editor who introduces her to the thrilling, underground world of bohemian, post-war Soho. She learns to be a reporter, to know art and artists, to embrace her life fully and with a deep love at the center of it. And when she finds herself pregnant, she doesn't hesitate to have the baby on her own. Later, in present-day London, a young painter named Elina dizzily navigates the first weeks of motherhood. She doesn't recognize herself: she finds herself walking outside with no shoes; she goes to the restaurant for lunch at nine in the morning; she can't recall the small matter of giving birth. But for her boyfriend, Ted, fatherhood is calling up lost memories, with images he cannot place. As Ted's memories become more disconcerting and more frequent, it seems that something might connect these two stories—these two women—something that becomes all the more heartbreaking and beautiful as they all hurtle toward its revelation. Praised by The Washington Post as a “breathtaking, heart-breaking creation,” The Hand That First Held Mine is a gorgeous and tenderly wrought story about the ways in which love and beauty bind us together. It is a gorgeous inquiry into the ways we make and unmake our lives, who we know ourselves to be, and how even our most accidental legacies connect us.
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 103901058X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
From the author of The Marriage Portrait and New York Times bestseller Hamnet comes My Lover’s Lover, an intense, unnerving and passionate story of betrayal, loss and love, with all the frisson and psychological intensity of Rebecca. When Lily moves into new boyfriend Marcus's apartment and plunges headlong into their relationship, she must contend with an intangible, hostile presence—Marcus’s ex-girlfriend, Sinead. As Lily and Marcus become more deeply involved, Lily becomes obsessed with Sinead's fate and thinks she sees her everywhere. She must question not only her sanity, but whether the man she loves is someone she can, or should, be with at all.
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 059368480X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The stunning, groundbreaking debut novel of wrenching love and grief from the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and National Book Circle Award Winner Hamnet Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice's family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended. A riveting story that skips through time and interweaves multiple points of view, After You'd Gone is a novel of stunning psychological depth, marking the debut of a major literary talent.
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 103901092X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Winner of the 2004 Somerset Maugham Award: Gripping, insightful, and deft—a haunting story about the ways our families shape our lives, from the award-winning author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait. On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous. They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: Tinder Press
ISBN: 0755372263
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
From the Costa Award winning, bestselling author of THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and I AM, I AM, I AM, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen, and reclaimed. 'Unputdownable' Ali Smith Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris's questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 1039011039
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
From the award-winning author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait: an irresistible novel about the collapse—and reawakening—of an unlikely marriage between an American professor and a reclusive actress. Daniel Sullivan, a young American professor reeling from a failed marriage and a brutal custody battle, is on vacation in Ireland when he falls in love with a world-famous actress who has fled fame for a rural village. Together, they make an idyllic life in the country, raising two more children in blissful seclusion—until a secret from Daniel's past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home. Shot through with humour and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is a captivating story of love in the twenty-first century from “one of the most exciting novelists alive” (The Washington Post).
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350455512
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 105
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Book Description
'She's like no one I've ever met... She's like fire and water all at once.' Warwickshire, 1582. Agnes Hathaway, a natural healer, meets the Latin tutor, William Shakespeare. Drawn together by powerful but hidden impulses, they create a life together and make a family. As William moves to London to discover his place in the world of theatre, Agnes stays at home to raise their three children but she is the constant presence and purpose of his life. When the plague steals 11-year-old Hamnet from his loving parents, they must each confront their loss alone. And yet, out of the greatest suffering, something of extraordinary wonder is born. This new play based on Maggie O'Farrell's best-selling novel and adapted by award-winning playwright Lolita Chakrabarti (Life of Pi, Red Velvet, Hymn), pulls back a curtain on the imagined family life of the greatest writer in the English language. Hamnet is a love letter to passion, birth, grief and the magic of nature. This updated and revised edition was published to coincide with the West End transfer of the original RSC production in October 2023.
Author: Philip Teir
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 1782830707
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
On the surface, the Paul family are living the liberal, middle-class dream in Helsinki. Max Paul is a renowned sociologist and his wife Katriina has a well-paid government job. They live in a beautiful apartment in the centre of the city. But look closer and the cracks start to show. As he approaches his sixtieth birthday, the certainties of Max's life begin to dissolve. His wife no longer loves him, and his grown-up daughters - one in London, one in Helsinki - have problems of their own. So when a former student turned journalist shows up and offers him a seductive lifeline, Max starts down a dangerous path from which he may never find a way back. Funny, sharp, and brilliantly truthful, Teir's debut has the feel of a big, contemporary, humane American novel, but with a distinctly Scandinavian edge.
Author: Bernardine Bishop
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1848547838
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
With the wit of Marina Lewycka, the piercing observation of Jane Gardam, and the bittersweet charm of Mary Wesley, this will appeal to all who loved Major Pettigrew's Last Stand or The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Cecilia Banks has a great deal on her plate. But when her son Ian turns up on her doostep with the unexpected consequence of a brief fling, she feels she has no choice but to take the baby into her life. Cephas's arrival is the latest of many challenges Cecilia has to face. There is the matter of her cancer, for a start, an illness shared with her novelist friend Helen. Then there is Helen herself, whose observations of Cecilia's family life reveal a somewhat ambivalent attitude to motherhood. Meanwhile Tim, Cecilia's husband, is taking self-effacement to extremes, and Ian, unless he gets on with it, will throw away his best chance at happiness. Cecilia, however, does not have to manage alone. In a convent in Hastings sits Sister Diana Clegg who holds the ties that bind everyone not only to each other, but to strangers as yet unmet. As events unfold, and as the truth about Cephas is revealed, we are invited to look closely at madness, guilt, mortal dread and the gift of resilience. No one will remain unchanged. 'Frank, courageous and entertaining. I felt better for reading it' Margaret Drabble
