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Overview
“Maggie O’Farrell is a hugely gifted, sympathetic, and ambitious writer, and This Must Be the Place deserves to be her breakout book.”
—Richard Russo
A dazzling novel from best-selling writer Maggie O’Farrell, winner of the Costa Novel Award—an irresistible love story that crisscrosses continents and time zones as it captures an extraordinary marriage, and an unforgettable family, with wit, humor, and deep affection.
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 pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway. Claudette was once the most glamorous and infamous woman in cinema before she staged her own disappearance and retreated to blissful seclusion in an Irish farmhouse.
But the life Daniel and Claudette have so carefully constructed is about to be disrupted by an unexpected discovery about a woman Daniel lost touch with twenty years ago. This revelation will send him off-course, far away from wife, children, and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
This Must Be the Place is a novel about family, identity, and true love: an intimately drawn portrait of a marriage, both the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart. O’Farrell writes with complexity, insight, and laugh-out-loud humor in a narrative that hurtles forward with powerful velocity and emotion. This Must Be the Place is a sophisticated, spellbinding summer read from one of the UK’s most highly acclaimed and best-loved novelists.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780385349420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2016 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
MAGGIE O'FARRELL is the author of six previous 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 Costa Novel Award; and Instructions for a Heatwave, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award. She lives in Edinburgh.
Read an Excerpt
This Must Be the Place
Maggie O'Farrell
The Strangest Feeling in My Legs
Daniel Donegal, 2010
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "This Must Be the Place"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Maggie O'Farrell.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
The Strangest Feeling in My Legs 3
I Am Not an Actress 35
Down at the Bottom of the Page 45
It's Really Very Simple 58
Auction Catalogue: Claudette Wells Memorabilia 75
How a Locksmith Must Feel 93
Enough Blue to Make 101
Where Am I and What Am I Doing Here? 112
The Kind of Place You'd Have Trouble Getting Out Of 119
Show Me Where ft Hurts 133
Severed Heads and Chemically Preserved Grouse 140
Something Only He Can See 167
The Tired Mind Is a Stovetop 182
Oxidized Copper Exactly 199
The Girl in Question 211
The Dark Oubliettes of the House 222
The Logical Loophole 237
A Jagged, Dangerous Mass of See 245
You Do What You Have to Do 253
When All the Tiny Lights Begin to Be Extinguished 265
Down the Line 278
And Who Are You? 284
Absolutely the Right Tree 294
An Unexpected Outcome 312
To Hang On, to Never Let Go 320
Always to Be Losing Things 331
Gold-Hatted, High-Bouncing Lover 353
For Dear Life 367
Acknowledgments 385
Reading Group Guide
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of This Must Be the Place, the dazzling new novel by Maggie O’Farrell, acclaimed author of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.
1. For an epigraph, O’Farrell selected a quote from a poem by Louis MacNeice: “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.” What does this mean? Why do you think she chose it?
2. We see various parts of the story through the eyes of more than a dozen characters, jumping back and forth in time. How do their points of view build on one another?
3. Daniel introduces Claudette to readers by saying, “My wife, I should tell you, is crazy” (page 5). Now that you’ve read the entire novel, do you believe he means this?
4. Why does Daniel’s hearing Nicola Janks’s voice on the radio set the entire story in motion?
5. On page 31, Daniel thinks, “That same feeling of dislocation between what you thought you were doing and what you actually did envelops me as I sit there, as I press my elbows into the surface of my desk. All along I’d thought my life had been one thing, but it now seems it might have been something else entirely.” What does he mean? Is he right about that?
6. The first chapter from Claudette’s perspective, “I Am Not an Actress,” is told from the first-person plural and second-person point of view. Why do you think O’Farrell chose to tell that portion of the story like that? What effect does it have?
7. What does Niall’s eczema symbolize?
8. On page 59, Phoebe describes her feeling of dissociation, “Like I’ve been cut down the middle and I’m in two places at once, or I’m getting radio interference from somewhere, or I’m just a shadow.” On page 361, Marithe describes a similar sensation. Aside from sharing a father, what is the connection between the girls?
9. What do we learn from the auction catalog of Claudette’s memorabilia?
10. When Myrna advises Daniel to go home—“ʻLeave whatever this is alone. What can be gained from turning over old coals?’” (page 118)—why doesn’t he listen? What could have changed if he had?
11. Several chapters are told from the perspective of minor characters, such as Lenny and Maeve. How does this reset your understanding of what’s happening?
12. Pascaline describes Daniel as “someone who is so . . . different on the inside from how they are on the outside” (page 134). What does she mean by that?
13. Why does Daniel’s career as a linguist, studying the way language changes, matter to the story? What does it tell us about his character?
14. What propels Daniel to track down Todd?
15. Why didn’t Todd give Daniel’s letter to Nicola?
16. How does Teresa’s story affect your understanding of Daniel’s behavior? What purpose does her story serve in the novel as a whole?
17. On page 249, Ari describes his stammer as being like an iceberg, “ʻOnly a small part of it is visible, while under the water is a large, jagged, dangerous mass of ice.’” What else in the novel might be described this way?
18. Grief affects some characters more profoundly than others. What similarities do you see in how Daniel and Niall dealt with Phoebe’s death? And differences?
19. Why does Claudette react the way she does when Daniel tells her about Nicola?
20. In the interview transcript, Timou tells the interviewer that Claudette ran away because of “you.” “ʻNot you personally but what you stand for. You are the synecdoche for what she ran away from’” (page 314). What does this mean?
21. Rosalind’s chapter, “Always to Be Losing Things,” reads almost like a stand-alone short story. Why do you think O’Farrell chose to add another layer to the novel? What do we learn here?
22. Rosalind tells Daniel, “ʻI have a theory . . . that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is’” (page 351). Does Daniel work this out? What does he say to Claudette?
23. Siblings—step-, half, full—play major roles in the novel. How might things have been different if, say, Lucas wasn’t always there for Claudette, or Ari didn’t eventually gain siblings of his own?
24. Toward the end of the novel, Daniel disarms Claudette by complimenting her on her parenting. Why does this have such an effect on her?