#instructions for a heatwave

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Instructions for a Heatwave | Author: Maggie O’Farrell | Publisher: Headline Book Publishing (2013)

[metaphorformetaphor]

How is it possible, when there are so many people in the world, for a life to be so shockingly solitary?

Maggie O'Farrell, from Instructions for a Heatwave (Headline Book Publishing, 2013)

[mood2you]

JOMPBPC September 27 Warm Colors

[maryannmackey]

She misses London. She misses it the way she missed Joe. A strange, cramped pain that leaves her almost unable to speak. She has never lived anywhere else until now. She hadn't really known that people lived anywhere else, or would want to. There are days when she can hardly bear it, when she walks across the landing of the house, again and again, her arms crossed over her middle, her mind overfilled with images of descending an escalator into the Piccadilly Line on a wet, darkened evening, everyone's umbrellas slicked with rain, of the ten minute walk between her old flat and her mother's house, of Highbury Fields on a misty day, of the view over the city from Primrose Hill. Homesick: she's found that it really does make you feel sick, ill, maddened by longing. But by evening, she is always ready, her grief behind her, hidden, like a deformity she must cover up. Hair up. Makeup on. Supper on the range. She will make this work; she will not go back; she will not let on to anyone; she will not show them that she's been beaten again. Monica, with her failed nursing degree, her childlessness, her husband who left her: she won't be that person. She will live here in this house with its shaky roof, its skirting-boards that scuttle at night, its moth-eaten furniture, its hostile neighbors. She will live here and she will say nothing.

Instructions for a Heatwave, Maggie O’Farrell

[beautyisasleepingcat]

Maggie O'Farrell: Instructions For a Heatwave (2013)

Maggie O’Farrell: Instructions For a Heatwave (2013)

I’m so behind with book reviews that it’s highly unlikely, I’ll ever catch up. This would have been one of many I was going to put aside “for later”, but the title’s too fitting to postpone reviewing it. And it was enjoyable.

The heatwave of the title refers to the heatwave of 1976, one of the worst the UK has ever seen. I don’t know anyone who was alive back then, no matter how small, who…

[digital-jam]

Lord Kitchener's Book Club

Lord Kitchener’s Book Club

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? One weekend, drifting through an old town built by Tudors and garden gnomes, intuition led me to the local book shop. Without glasses, I looked at the books with squinted, wizened eyes,  like I was trying to set them on fire with my mind. At the end of the browsing, I was confronted with the…

[vintageanchorbooks]

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager?

Maggie O'Farrell, Instructions for a Heatwave

[noble-deeds-hot-baths]

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

Maggie O'Farrell, 'Instructions for a Heatwave.' 

[bookshelfexchange-blog]

Instructions For A Heatwave By Maggie O'Farrell

I picked this book up because I read a review about it somewhere... I can't remember where. 

It sat on a shelf forever. 

Then I picked it out of the pile all willy nilly 'cause I am trying to read 150 books this year.

Instructions for a Heatwave is about a fractured family, in the midst of a massive heatwave in England in the 70's.

The father tells the mother that he is going out to get the paper and then he doesn't come back. The whole family is brought back together to deal with years of lies and turmoil, judgement, hardship, religion blah blah blah.

I though there would be more mystery to it. But it fell short in that regard. I found I had a lot more questions, then answers towards the end. I did however love, love the fact that there was a dyslexic.

I wasn't committed to the novel to be quite honest.  It just served as background noise. I did like the tone though. It did foster an amount of mystery that made it hard to stop reading.

[registrarism]

Hot, hot, hot

Hot, hot, hot - brief Prole Art Threat book review

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

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…

[libertyhous]

"Instructions for a Heatwave" by Maggie O'Farrell #0539 Review by Simay Yildiz

“Instructions for a Heatwave” by Maggie O’Farrell #0539 Review by Simay Yildiz

Title: Instructions for a Heatwave Author: Maggie O’Farrell Publisher: Knopf Pages: 304 Format: Epub Source: Personal purchase

  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;…

[hazelia]

Such a lovely thing to say and uttered with such profundity, looking deep into her eyes. She straight away forgot why he'd said it and it became such a beautiful general statement. He understood. Everything. Every last thing about her.

Maggie O'Farrell

[denimcollar-blog]

She had that washed, tremulous feeling you get after a bout of crying. Like a London street after the cleaners had been down it; dark, wetted, cleansed.

Instructions for a Heatwave, Maggie O'Farrell

[westmeathlibrary]

2013 Costa Novel Award shortlist

Life After Life, Kate Atkinson (check the library : http://goo.gl/yYAnJS

Unexpected Lessons in Love, Bernardine Bishop

Instructions for a Heatwave, Maggie O’Farrell (check the library : http://goo.gl/ZepT2N

All the Birds, Singing, Evie Wyld,/li>

[noble-deeds-hot-baths]

Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general. Her mind, these past few days, has been filling up with things like, I saw the oddest-looking baby in the butcher's today, did you see there's a new ticket man at the tube station, do you remember that hairdresser's Bridie went to. Her temples ache with all that is unspoken, unlistened to.

Maggie O'Farrell, 'Instructions for a Heatwave.' 

[ddaappoo]

just started reading instructions for a heatwave. been meaning to start this for ages seeing as i've heard loads about it. hopefully it doesn't disappoint.