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Tag: Maggie O’Farrell

Instructions for a Heatwave, Maggie O’Farrell

Published 19 Jul 2013 by Gin Jenny

Maggie O’Farrell and Kate Morton are inextricably linked in my mind. I am not sure whether it’s because they’re truly similar — with olden-times Britain and modern-day family members finding out secrets — or because they’re very faintly similar and I encountered them at the same time in my life. Weigh in if you have an opinion! And now on to Maggie O’Farrell’s brand new book. Instructions for a Heatwave (Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is less suspenseful than the previous books by Maggie O’Farrell that I’ve read (or else I am maybe remembering her previous books all wrong). Gretta Riordan’s…

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The Hand that First Held Mine, Maggie O’Farrell

Published 26 Nov 2010 by Gin Jenny

Family tragedy book song time! (I’m kidding. I have not composed a family tragedy book song. YET.) Maggie O’Farrell’s newest book, The Hand that First Held Mine, focuses on two sets of characters in two different times: Alexandra (Sandra, Lexie), who goes off to London to seek her fortune (in the 1950s), and Elina and Ted, who have just come through a dangerous pregnancy and are struggling to recover from it (in the present day). If you suppose there is no connection between them, I can only assume you have never read a book before. The Hand that First Held…

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After You’d Gone, Maggie O’Farrell

Published 4 May 2010 by Gin Jenny

After You’d Gone begins at the end: our protagonist Alice sees something nasty in the woodshed (as it were; it’s not really a woodshed) and shortly thereafter gets hit by a car (possibly on purpose) and lapses into a coma.  The rest of the book goes circling and swooping around what happened and why and what it meant to Alice, exploring her past and her mother’s and her grandmother’s, shifting points of view and tenses every few pages.  I know I complained recently about rapidly-shifting narrative focus.  It’s disorienting here too, and there’s no reason to be changing tenses every…

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The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O’Farrell

Published 5 Apr 2009 by Gin Jenny

Let us begin with two girls at a dance. They are at the edge of the room.  One sits on a chair, opening and shutting a dance-card with gloved fingers.  The other stands beside her, watching the dance unfold: the circling couples, the clasped hands, the drumming shoes, the whirling skirts, the bounce of the floor.  It is the last hour of the year and the windows behind them are blank with night.  The seated girl is dressed in something pale, Esme forgets what, the other in a dark red frock that doesn’t suit her.  She has lost her gloves. …

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