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📂 **Category**: Fiction,Maggie O’Farrell,Autobiography and memoir,Books,Culture,Hamnet,Film adaptations
💡 **What You’ll Learn**:
10 My lover (2002)
The ghost of your ex is always a challenge, especially if you (wrongly) believe she is already dead. This is the unenviable situation of Lily, the heroine of O’Farrell’s second novel, who is swept away by the dashing architect Marcus and moves in with him on short notice. Lily takes his assertions that her predecessor Sinead is “no longer with us” to signify a more permanent absence; In fact, Sinead has simply been abandoned, and it is in the details of the breakdown of her relationship with Marcus that the novel occupies most of its time. The hints of a gothic ghost story deepen one of the main points, which is that Marcus is made up almost entirely of red flags.
9 The distance between us (2004)
Heritage and belonging drive much of O’Farrell’s novels, and the gradual release of information to her readers often drives her novels. She is also interested in literal and metaphorical journeys, and this novel begins in Hong Kong, where Chinese New Year celebrations are disrupted by sudden and dangerous chaos. Meanwhile, a woman on a bridge in London sees a familiar face and takes that as her cue to leave the country. These dramatic events don’t make any sense at first, but it’s the contrast between the characters’ immediate isolation and their complex, densely populated backgrounds that draws us in.
8 The hand that held mine first (2010)
O’Farrell returns again and again to the territory of new motherhood, and to how it intersects with previous generational trauma, and here she lays out two identical stories. At the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to Elena, an artist living in contemporary London, who is navigating the aftermath of the birth of her first child, and to Lexie, who arrives in the capital in the 1950s from small-town England and almost immediately finds herself upended by an aggressive love affair. What connects them will unfold, but it is the picture of life before and after birth—marked by identity reconfiguration—that captures the reader’s attention.
7 after you left (2000)
O’Farrell’s debut novel won the Betty Trask Prize, and it’s easy to see why the judges thought this was a promising writer. Even more surprising is its ambition: the central character, Alice, lies in a coma, which the reader gathers follows an unnamed but catastrophic event. Equally mysterious is the sudden realization that strikes Alice in a public train station toilet the day after her accident – a part of the narrative that takes us back to her childhood and the ambiguous life of her difficult, frustrating mother. Further plots reveal a love story jeopardized by religious and cultural collisions, demonstrating O’Farrell’s interest in exploring taboos and their long-lasting effects.
6 Instructions for dealing with a heat wave2013)
Those too young to remember the ruptured riverbeds and public water pumps of the British heatwave of 1976 will enjoy the period detail of O’Farrell’s sixth novel, which forms the backdrop to a compulsively readable missing person’s mystery. The absentee in question is Robert Riordan, a recently retired Irish citizen from London who goes out to work at a newspaper one morning and fails to return. Summoned home to support their mother, Greta, Robert’s three adult children find themselves uncomfortable, watching family dynamics play out tensely in this moment of apparent crisis that provides most of the novel’s deliciously depicted drama.
5 Marriage photo (2022)
A chilling episode in the history of Renaissance marriage and a famous Victorian poem form the basis of O’Farrell’s latest novel, which reimagines the fate of Lucrezia de’ Medici, the child bride of the Duke of Ferrara. Lucrezia’s death in 1561, possibly by poisoning, was the inspiration for Robert Browning’s book My Last Duchess, which left its readers in no doubt that her husband was an unrepentant murderer. O’Farrell’s goal, in recreating and later reenacting the events that took place at Ferrara’s court, is to allow us to consider the ease with which women and girls were moved between dynastic families and stately courts—and to ask what might have happened if they had been allowed to whisper by proxy.
4 TIt Must Be The Place (2016)
There is something of a soul game in this story of the whereabouts of Claudette Wells, the mercurial film star who ended her career and hid in the wilds of Donegal. That O’Farrell tells her story through multiple narrators, moving between places and time periods, heightens the suspicion that the author was intent on creating a kaleidoscopic effect, one in which the overall picture is constantly shattered and remade. But the central story still emerges, and it is Claudette’s philandering husband, Daniel, who is left to try to put all the pieces together – and decide whether or not the couple’s marriage can last.
3 The Vanishing Law of Linux Name (2006)
Years before Hamnet, O’Farrell had made a partial foray into historical fiction to captivating effect: this split-time-frame novel about family secrets remains one of her most impressive works. In the present, Iris tries to understand the fate of her great-aunt Esme, who disappeared from records as a young woman in Edinburgh; She could ask her grandmother Kitty, Esme’s sister, if Alzheimer’s hasn’t lost Kitty’s understanding of reality. The picture that emerges from Iris’s powerful research is a disturbing one: Esme did not travel, but was in fact committed to a psychiatric unit 60 years ago for entirely questionable, non-psychiatric reasons.
2 I, I, I: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017)
Some of the encounters detailed in this riveting memoir may seem closer than others to ending the author’s life prematurely: a cramp of childhood encephalitis, which left her with lasting neurological problems, is more profound than the terror she felt as a knife-thrower’s guinea pig on stage. But each of these experiences reinforces O’Farrell’s understanding of how dangerous and strange human death is, and they are recounted with a kind of amazement at their own survival. Most poignant and poignant of all is the book’s final essay, an account of her daughter’s daily battle with a life-threatening immune condition, which turns the world into a landscape of potentially catastrophic threats.
1 hamnet (2020)
Even before Chloe Zhao, Jessie Buckley, and Paul Mescal brought Hamnet to a screen near you, O’Farrell’s eighth novel was a massive success story, winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction and expanding her already significant readership. There was a hypothesis, of course: depicting the death of Hamnet, William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, in 1596, was a strikingly bold move, but O’Farrell then took away the centrality of the playwright, focusing instead on his wife Agnes, and setting the novel not in London but in Stratford-upon-Avon. There her work of imaginative reclamation takes place, as we see Agnes – not the marginal Anne Hathaway she has become – as a skilled and experienced herbalist, following her in the agonizing throes of grief.
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