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Instructions for a Heatwave Audiobook
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Publisher Description
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.
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“Narrator John Lee’s lyrical cadence sets the mood…[with] his pacing, energy, and native British accent (tinged with an Irish lilt) to fit each character…Lee subtly increases the emotional tension—until everything boils over, forcing the family to face their truths. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
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“John Lee brilliantly narrates this audiobook, his deep voice bringing forth the hot summer day Gretta’s husband disappears.”
— BookRiot -
“O’Farell’s a compassionate writer, showing us every member of the family from a variety of viewpoints, ensuring that we understand and feel for every one of them even as they drive each other mad.”
— Irish Times (Dublin) -
“Acutely observed…revelatory, redemptive, and moving.””
— The Guardian (London)
Awards
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Selected for the July 2013 Indie Next List
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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A BookRiot Pick of Best Family Drama Audiobooks
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An Entertainment Weekly “Must Read”
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About Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell is the author of several novels, including her debut novel, After You’d Gone, which won a Betty Trask Award; The Distance between US, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; and The Hand That First Held Mine, winner of the Costa Novel Award. She has worked as the deputy literary editor of the London Independent on Sunday.
About John Lee
John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is an accomplished stage actor and has written and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963–64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.