Book Review: “Instructions for a Heatwave” by Maggie O’Farrell

I think this book made its onto my book list through repeated TikTok recommendations and I’m so glad it did! This novel is a story about a disjointed Irish family living in London navigating the father’s disappearance, with a heatwave and the aftermath of The Troubles shaping their environment. The family consists of the mother Gretta, a very particular, fidgety sort of woman, her husband Robert who goes missing and her three children Michael Francis, Monica and Aoife. The story is most successful, in my opinion, when the dynamics between the siblings are being unearthed through their interactions and flashbacks to their childhood. The book is written in third person and often switches between points of view multiple times within a chapter. As the matriarch and children attempt to solve the mystery of Robert’s disappearance, old issues between them bubble up to the surface and force themselves to be resolved, resulting in extremely vulnerable and often comedic interactions between the characters. I really enjoyed mentally mapping how each person’s secrets connected, and it was exciting to get a new point of view so often within chapters because I could add more information to my theories. Every so often, there’s a paragraph or page giving very detailed imagery about the landscape of a scene which made it easy to build up the world in my head. This book did somewhat fuel my anti-child notions because each character deals with repercussions as a result of their children, siblings, and/or their birth order as a child. It seemed like in each chapter, someone was recognizing how a certain part of their life had been stifled or somehow negatively impacted because they had a child or were a child themselves. However, I think in the end, issues surrounding this subject are tied up in a satisfying way. If you are someone who is super nosy, loves getting into the nitty-gritty of interpersonal relationships, enjoys juggling the secrets of characters and wants to laugh throughout, I highly recommend this novel.

I don’t have any fun quotes pulled from the book this time, compared to my I’m a Fan review, because this was a physical book rather than a digital copy, and I’m not an avid annotator when I read physical copies. I remember reading this book in a cafe in Austin a month ago, and a woman struck up a conversation with me because she had read other novels from the author. Definitely going to check out other books from O’Farrell!