This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell will be featured on the Radio 2 Book Club on Monday 23 May.
The book was selected with the help of a panel made up of Reading Agency and library staff from across the UK.
We have an exclusive extract available for you to read before the show.
This Must be the Place
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?
Selection panel review
Our library reading panel loved This Must Be the Place – here are some of their comments:
“I loved this book. Its characters are flawed, make bad decisions and act on impulse but I felt very attached to all of them. It’s elegantly written and jumps effortlessly between different decades, countries and narrative viewpoints. It’s very perceptive and honest about the messiness of extended families and long term relationships, but also really insightful about identity, memory and how decisions we made in the past have a habit of coming back to bite us. I’ll definitely be reading more from Maggie O’Farrell and recommending her work to others.”
“A fascinating book about so much – relationships and trust, the breakdown of marriages and the effect on the children, parents and childlessness, lost loves…and how thoughtless acts can have such repercussions. Yet it’s not a doom and gloom book, there’s a lot of humour, and likeable quirky characters. I liked the insight that came from chapters being written from the perspective of different characters.”
“I got caught up in the characterisation and the depiction of grief, loneliness, celebrity, finding a place. The book drew me in and examined the intensity of personal relationships and paths taken. I liked the title, I liked the journey through the landscape and the description of those places. It was very satisfying and questioning and the people were real and beautifully portrayed.”
About the author
Maggie O’Farrell is the author of seven 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, The Hand that First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award, and This Must be the Place. She lives in Edinburgh.
Get involved
Tune in to Simon Mayo’s Drivetime show on Monday 23 May to hear a live interview with Maggie O’Farrell talking about her book.
Have you read This Must Be the Place, or any other books by Maggie O’Farrell? You can share your thoughts with us on Twitter, post a review, or add it to your group’s reading list.
Want to find out more? Take a look at the Radio 2 Book Club Twitter feed or find out more on the Radio 2 Book Club website
