This Must Be The Place by Maggie O Farrell

 

Our Rating 3⭐s

401 pages 

Published 2016

You can find out more about Maggie O'Farrell here

• The Blurb...

A reclusive former film star living in the wilds of Ireland, Claudette Wells thinks nothing of firing a gun if strangers get too close to her house. Why is she so fiercely protective of her family, and what made her walk out on her career at the height of her fame?

Her husband Daniel, reeling from a discovery about a woman he last saw twenty years ago, is about to make an exit of his own. It is a journey that will send him off-course, far from home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?

This Must Be The Place crosses continents and time zones, creating a portrait of an extraordinary marriage, the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart.

• Our Review...

Full disclosure, this was a buddy read with my daughter who loved Hamnet. 

The characters are all fully developed and all have a hinterland that drives them. This book is about love and death and loyalty and missed chances. All life is here. It is a complex novel in that there are numerous characters and zigg-zagging timelines for most of the main ones. 

I must admit I am not a fan of literary fiction. It feels to me like reading a tv soap opera. I just dont get the point. Describing someones life is, well just a bit....boring. I love a murder, a denuemont, and arrest and an end point. That said this a fine example of writing. The ups downs of Daniel and Claudettes love life tug on the heartstrings and there are moments of comedy. Maggie O Farrell does have a wonderful way of writing about real life. She has depth and warmth and a wonderful turn of phrase as can been by our selected quotes.  But I think that's my problem. I dont want to read about real life. I read to escape real life. Its not that the author or book is not for me I think the issue is that the genre is not for me. I love to read about The Godfather, or Emporer Claudius or George Smiley. I have seen numerous reviews that gave this book 5 stars and my daughter loved the book. Its just not my jam. 

• Selected Quotes...

Here is what my brother smells of: paper, computers, cotton, emollient, toast, soap substitute, herbal tea, windowless rooms. My brother smells of hard work. My brother smells of intelligence, of all-nighters, of education, of dedication and sometimes, I think, loneliness.

On the surface I am one thing but underneath I am riddled with holes and caverns, like a limestone landscape.

The groom will rarely look at the photographs and, when he does, will be struck most by how many of the guests – considered, at the time, to be crucial presences in his life – he no longer

Spry’ is the word used for people of her age, isn’t it? Horrible word, Rosalind reflects, like a mixture of ‘spray’ and ‘why’.

When Todd and Suki heard that an American exchange student was being billeted in the vacant room in the eaves of their graduate flat, they were not pleased. They pictured a toothy type with trainers and V-necks and white socks. They pictured someone who might, of all things, attend church. Americans were religious, weren’t they? He would have hotdog-scented breath, a penchant for soft rock and a backpack full of college sweatshirts. He would want to join fraternities.

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