"This Must Be the Place" by Maggie O'Farrell is the IrishCentral Book of the Month.
"This Must Be the Place" by Maggie O'Farrell is the January 2025 selection for the IrishCentral Book Club.
Each month, we will pick a new Irish book or a great book by an Irish author and celebrate the amazing ability of the Irish to tell a good story for the IrishCentral Book Club.
Published in 2016, O'Farrell's "This Must Be the Place" was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, the Books Are My Bag Reader Awards, the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year, and the BGE Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year.
A reclusive ex-film star living in the wilds of Ireland, Claudette Wells is a woman whose first instinct, when a stranger approaches her home, is to reach for her shotgun. Why is she so fiercely protective of her family, and what made her walk out of her cinematic career when she had the whole world at her feet?
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 away from the life he and Claudette have made together. Will their love for one another be enough to bring Daniel back home?
"A symphony of stories and voices... absolutely gripping... A rare talent to enthral... It will leave you bereft and wanting more." - Sunday Times
"An utterly compelling story which loops between decades and the hearts of its characters with enormous warmth, wit and poignancy." - Isabel Costello
"A tour de force, a complex and nuanced story leaping effortlessly across multiple time frames... 'This Must Be the Place' is that 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 emotional insight 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." - Observer
Derry native Maggie O'Farrell, FRSOL, is the author of "Hamnet," winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir "I Am, I Am, I Am," both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers.
Her novels include "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 2010 Costa Novel Award, "Instructions for a Heatwave," "This Must Be the Place," and "The Marriage Portrait."
She is also the author of two books for children, "Where Snow Angels Go" and "The Boy Who Lost His Spark."