This Must Be the Place

Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2016

I gaze back at my wife… From where she is standing, I might not even be here at all.

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 shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway.

He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with twenty years ago, and this discovery will send him off-course, far away from wife and home.

Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?

A Sunday Times top ten bestseller, this dazzling new novel from Costa Novel Award-winner Maggie O'Farrell crosses time zones and continents to reveal an extraordinary portrait of a marriage, the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart.

This Must Be the Place, Maggie O’Farrell’s seventh novel, is a dazzling, intimate epic about who we leave behind and who we become as we search for our place in the world.

'A tour de force...her best novel to date, a book that surely confirms her as one of the UK's most assured, accomplished and inventive storytellers' - The Observer

'A symphony of stories and voices...absolutely gripping' Sunday Times 'Magnificent...perceptive, profound and page-turning in equal measures' - Cathy Rentzenbrink

Waterstones has been a keen early advocate of Maggie O’Farrell since we identified her as a talent to watch in our 25 Authors of the Future list back in 2007 after supporting her brilliant debut After You’d Gone. Since then she’s continued to impress with a further six novels, including Instructions for a Heatwave and The Hand That First Held Mine for which she won the Costa Book Award.