This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell

From the award-winning author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait: an irresistible novel about the collapse—and reawakening—of an unlikely marriage between an American professor and a reclusive actress.

Daniel Sullivan, a young American professor reeling from a failed marriage and a brutal custody battle, is on vacation in Ireland when he falls in love with a world-famous actress who has fled fame for a rural village. Together, they make an idyllic life in the country, raising two more children in blissful seclusion—until a secret from Daniel’s past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home.

Shot through with humour and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is a captivating story of love in the twenty-first century from “one of the most exciting novelists alive” (The Washington Post).

MAGGIE O’FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), The Marriage Portrait, After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.

Author Residence: London, UK

Author Hometown: Coleraine, Northern Ireland

Aug 15, 2023