This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld, Graham Rowat

Overview

The dazzling new novel from bestselling, award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE crosses time zones and continents to reveal an extraordinary portrait of a marriage. Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway. He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with twenty years ago, and this discovery will send him off-course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back? THIS MUST BE THE PLACE crosses continents and time zones, giving voice to a diverse and complex cast of characters. At its heart, it is an extraordinary portrait of a marriage, the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart. Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel is a dazzling, intimate epic about who we leave behind and who we become as we search for our place in the world.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Elizabeth Graver

"World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural," reads the epigraph to Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel—a quote from Louis MacNeice's poem Snow that might serve as an appetizer (or warning, depending on your proclivities) for what's to come. This Must Be the Place is an "incorrigibly plural" book, offering its story through a kaleidoscopic proliferation of points of view, fractured chronologies and geographical shifts. The result…is marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time…This wide-ranging novel has a vivid sense of play, despite its sometimes sober subject matter. Mostly, its experiments bear fruit.

From the Publisher

Intensely absorbing. . . . O’Farrell writes novels in which you can happily lose yourself.” —NPR

“Compassionate. . . . Few contemporary writers equal Maggie O’Farrell’s gift for combining intricate, engrossing plots with full-bodied characterizations.” —The Washington Post
 
“Heartfelt.” —Vogue

“Marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Extraordinary. . . . An engrossing novel . . . from a writer of impressive, perhaps masterly, skills.” —The Washington Times

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-05-03
A reclusive French film star, her American linguist husband, and their exes, parents, siblings, and children from various marriages feature in a sophisticated story about love. In an interlocking series of narratives set from 1944 to 2016, in places ranging from Sussex to Goa to Brooklyn, with titles like "The Tired Mind Is a Stovetop," "How a Locksmith Must Feel," and "When All the Tiny Lights Begin to Be Extinguished," British novelist O'Farrell (Instructions for A Heat Wave, 2013, etc.) unfolds the history of Daniel Sullivan and Claudette Wells. After being discovered in her early 20s by a Swedish film director, Claudette became an international icon and obsession on the most extreme scale possible—until the day she disappeared so completely she was assumed dead. Actually, she was hiding at a remote location in Donegal, where unhappy Berkeley professor Daniel, in Ireland to collect his grandfather's ashes, finds her broken down by the side of the road. From that literal and figurative intersection—as the title says, "this must be the place"—the story shoots out in many directions, past and future. Almost every character struggles with some burdensome disability—stuttering, eczema, anorexia, agoraphobia, infertility—and yet all have a magnetic star quality courtesy of O'Farrell's excellent characterizations. The scenario is glamorous, the writing is stylish, the globe-trotting almost dizzying, but there's a satisfying core of untempered feeling as well. Here's Daniel, reunited with Claudette after a separation: "I don't think our language contains a word with sufficient largesse or capacity to express the euphoria I feel as I bury my face in her hair….What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another." Or sister-in-law Maeve, upon picking up her adopted daughter in Chengdu, China: "If she was a liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breather her in; if she was a pill, she would down her; a dress, she would wear her; a plate, she would lick her clean." Juicy and cool, this could be O'Farrell's U.S. breakthrough book.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170760671
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	07/19/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

This Must Be the Place

Maggie O'Farrell

The Strangest Feeling in My Legs

Daniel Donegal, 2010
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "This Must Be the Place"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Maggie O'Farrell.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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