This Must Be the Place

A Sunday Times bestseller, the dazzling new novel from Costa Novel Award-winner Maggie O'Farrell THIS MUST BE THE PLACE crosses time zones and continents to reveal an extraordinary portrait of a marriage.

'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' *Observer*

'Her most ambitious novel to date… one of this summer's most anticipated reads' *Sunday Times*

**'Inventive, moving and hilarious. I loved it' Rachel Joyce

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?

**
Review
“Maggie O’Farrell is a hugely gifted, sympathetic, and ambitious writer, and THIS MUST BE THE PLACE will send this reader—and, I suspect, many others—racing to her backlist.”
—Richard Russo, best-selling author of Everybody’s Fool


“Inventing, moving, and hilarious.  I loved it.”

—Rachel Joyce, best-selling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“The scenario is glamourous, the writing is stylish, the globe-trotting almost dizzying, but there’s a satisfying core of untampered feeling as well…juicy and cool, this could be O’Farrell’s U.S. breakthrough book.”  
—Kirkus Reviews, starred

Praise from the UK:
“Stylistically, narratively, emotionally, This Must Be the Place is a tour de force, a complex and nuanced story leaping effortlessly across multiple characters, continents and time frames….This Must Be The Place is a rare literary beast: both technically dazzling and deeply moving.  It has all the structural and temporal playfulness of a Kate Atkinson novel while retaining the hallmark of emotional intensity for which O’Farrell has become renowned.  It is her best novel to date, a book that surely confirms her as one of the UK’s most assured, accomplished and inventive storytellers.” 
—The Guardian


“Complex in scale, but carried off with dazzling grace. A rich, engrossing feast of a novel to lose yourself in.”
—Sunday Mirror


“There is tragedy, but also sharp comedy, and O’Farrell, skillful as ever, plays with the novel form…rewarding and humane.”
—Sunday Express


“Dazzling, her most accomplished book yet.”
—The National


Beautifully executed…a graceful, insightful exploration of a relationship in all its wonders and woes.”
—Mail on Sunday


“Her most ambitious novel to date, crisscrossing the Atlantic and three decades, and told from multiple perspectives, This Must Be the Place is one of the summer’s most anticipated reads.”
—Sunday Times


“A new Maggie O’Farrell book is always a cause for celebration, but her seventh is so brilliant you’ll want to unfurl flags and put up bunting in her honor….wonderfully written and absolutely addicting.”
—Psychologies Magazine

About the Author
MAGGIE O'FARRELL is the author of six previous novels, After You’d Gone; My Lover’s Lover; The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox; The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the Costa Book Award; and Instructions for a Heatwave, which was short-listed for the Costa Book Award. She lives in Edinburgh.