Britain’s furious heatwave of 1976: cracked earth, water shortages, yellowed grass, and the fraying of tempers and patience. And, in the frantic midst of it all, the vanishing of a husband.
Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel takes us back to that unbearably hot summer and encloses us in the drama of the tight-knit Riordan family. 

Gretta, the archetypal ‘Irish mammy’ is up early baking soda bread (she refuses to let the hot weather dislodge her household traditions) whilst her husband, Robert, strolls off to get a morning paper. He doesn’t come back and Gretta gathers her scattered offspring to the family home to help in the crisis.

None of her three children are particularly happy to be summoned, as all are battling with their own private demons but the ties of the Irish Catholic family are too tight to be shrugged off, so each dutifully returns home: Michael, whose wife is ruffled, unhappy and on the verge of mentioning divorce; Monica, who is struggling to find acceptance from her new husband’s sulky daughters and Aoife, the rebellious one, trying to invent a life in New York despite being burdened by a secret. 

All three children arrive back on the well-trodden doorstep, dutiful and good but, at the same time,  suffocated by mother-love, sibling tensions and the insatiable heat.

So begins the family campaign to track down their missing father.

Maggie O’Farrell is obviously a gifted storyteller, and when you open her novels you are guaranteed a good read. She reels off this family drama with prose that shimmers like a heat haze but I felt it was, at times, too ambitious. She uses a narrative technique which dips and dives between the points of view of so many characters that I felt the novel would have been better served had she restricted herself to one or two.

Instead, we weave between the viewpoints of Gretta, Michael, Monica and Aoife. This means we are offered glimpses into the backstory of each but with never enough time or narrative space to delve deeply into them. Michael’s segments in particular are fascinating. He is torn between love for his family and the teasing ambition, which he can’t quite snuff out, to finish his PhD and escape to American academia. Meanwhile, his wife smarts at having to surrender her own freedom to be a wife and mother. 

Or what about Aoife’s story? Fleeing the family to start again in New York, working with a famous photographer, shielding her draft-dodger lover, all whilst struggling with an oppressive secret. 

There is so much material which we are only permitted a glimpse at. I feel the novel would have been stronger had it been done on a smaller canvas but with more detail. However, it’s still a great read: entertaining, atmospheric and with flashes of fine humour. 


Instructions For A Heatwave is published by Tinder Press


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