Instructions for a Heatwave

Set during the legendary summer of 1976, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE by Maggie O’Farrell was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller.

‘The Riordans will stay in your mind long after you finish this book. They’re funny, infuriating and impossible not to love. They feel like family’ Irish Times

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 home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.