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    This Must Be the Place
    This Must Be the Place
    This Must Be the Place
    Audiobook14 hours

    This Must Be the Place

    Written by Maggie O'Farrell

    Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld and Graham Rowat

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The dazzling new novel from bestselling, award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE crosses time zones and continents to reveal an extraordinary portrait of a marriage. 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? THIS MUST BE THE PLACE crosses continents and time zones, giving voice to a diverse and complex cast of characters. At its heart, it is an extraordinary portrait of a marriage, the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart. Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel is a dazzling, intimate epic about who we leave behind and who we become as we search for our place in the world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 19, 2016
    ISBN9781501916014
    This Must Be the Place
    Author

    Maggie O'Farrell

    MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include The Marriage Portrait, Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, 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.

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    Reviews for This Must Be the Place

    4/5

    330 ratings28 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Wonderful, beautifully written. It’s so all encompassing that I can’t even say what it’s about. It’s about love and loss. The writer seems to reveal my own life story through her characters. Bravo.
    • 4/5
      This was the best book I have read in a while. This author is so expressive, and her books are so different. She is quite talented. There are such lovely passages in this, and the reader gets caught up in the different threads of the story that all come together in the end. I loved it!
    • 5/5
      Love everything O'Farrell has written that i have read, the writing is beautiful, there are many characters and time shifts, which could be confusing, but overall another winner.
    • 4/5
      Superb and engaging writing. BUT arguably the story jumps around too much and follows too many people. More problematic is that the main characters are entitled,static, and generally unsympathetic.
    • 5/5
      I completely enjoyed this book! The author has a wonderful style that kept me interested and the narrator kept me engaged, perfect pairing. Ready for another!
    • 5/5
      Spectacularly well written, beautifully performed and with an engaging story, or rather different strands of a narrative pulling together. It’s restrained yet luscious. A rare combination.
    • 4/5
      This layered portrait of a marriage and each of their combined histories was fascinating. A reclusive movie star and a troubled divorced man with secrets of his own create a tumultuous pair. Each of their children (from previous relationships and together) has their own issues. It reminded me so much of A Visit from the Goon Squad. I started out on vacation last month, but read it slowly for weeks. I loved seeing the characters from both other peoples’ POVs (like Rosalind, an older woman on an adventure) and their own. “How different it all might have been, how minuscule the causes and how devastating their effects.”
    • 4/5
      This was an easy, but enjoyable read. Daniel lives with his wife, reclusive former actress Claudette, and their 2 small children Marithe and Calvin, (and sometimes Ari, Claudette's older son from a previous relationship) on an isolated estate in Ireland. Their life is idyllic until one day Daniel is confronted with some unresolved issues from his past, which he takes off to try to resolve. Not surprisingly this leads to difficulties between him and Claudette. Daniel also has to deal with his two children from his first marriage who he rarely saw during their growing up years, but with whom he now wants to develop a relationship.There is nothing profound about this book, but the characters are lovely and beautifully portrayed, and the story is engaging. A lot of the book involves parent/child relationships, and I generally enjoy books where those relationships are realistically and sympathetically portrayed, from the child's earliest years until the time a parent must accept the child as an adult.Recommended.3 1/2 stars
    • 3/5
      I loved and hated this book. It skipped around in time and character, which was pretty confusing. I liked Daniel, but didn't like many of the things he had done and was doing. I liked that he and his children mended their relationship, but was angry that he hadn't gone out of his way to stay in their lives after his divorce from his first wife. In general I guess I don't care for flawed characters?
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book which traces the lives of Claudette and Daniel across many decades. Their lives, the lives of their parents, their siblings, their children, their ex-spouses, ex-lovers all play a part in this wonderful family saga about relationships across continents and years.
    • 5/5
      Maggie O’Farrell goes from strength to strength. Totally engrossing story.
    • 4/5
      Highly narrative and quite a page turner. Contains many narratives of the different characters involved or at least related to the main story. At times I found this disconcerting and I am not at all fond of flashback so that I even skipped a couple of chapters/stories. But in the end this skillful author has timed the main story and character development in such a way that I had to read the final chapters without a break -- good thing it was a lazy Sunday morning.
    • 4/5
      Another book from a Dalkey Book Festival attendee, I enjoyed the writing a lot, the characters were well drawn.
    • 5/5
      Character driven novels are my favorite genre. I, therefore loved this book. Daniel marries Claudette with a lot of baggage, some of which he is unable to communicate to his wife. Throughout the book we learn the history of their lives as well as the situation with their children. Some chapters are devoted to minor characters and even though I pondered whether we needed those stories, I always found them absorbing for they added something about the Daniel and Claudette.
    • 4/5
      Ms. O’Farrell has drawn a brilliant analogy for her style of writing early in the book. The main character, Daniel, a linguist, tells Ari, upon their first meeting, to try and find another word when Ari starts stuttering. Magic! Ari is able to conjure not one but ten words without a stutter. O’Farrell uses multitudinous similes continuously and seamless throughout the book. Her point is made convincingly and we know how she feels about her characters on each page. I will admit to moments when I muttered, “OK, I get it”.

      Her chapters give each character a voice, a time frame, a situation and room for the reader to wonder how this will all play out while allowing the story to move on. The pieces fall into place, we see the disasters in the distance, we realize we may care about these people and we wish for hope, faith, redemption, caring, love.

      A brief aside - As I was reading the book the lyrics from a song by The Clash kept resonating: “Should I stay or should I go?”!
    • 3/5
      With her first book, After You'd Gone, Maggie O'Farrell won my goodwill forever. She a writer who writes well, and has an ability to bring her characters to life, they don't exist idly on a page. Her novels are hard to characterize, they're somewhat lighter than most literary fiction, but they're lacking in any adherence to formula and tend to explore what loss does to a person in some way or another. So This Must be the Place fits right in with her usual novels. In it, Daniel meets Claudette and they get married, but both of them have complicated pasts that they never fully dealt with. Daniel has children from a previous marriage, as well as romantic relationships that ended badly, while Claudette left behind a long-term relationship and a successful career that she fled from, leaving with her son early one morning and hiding out in the most rural corner of Ireland she can find. They're both not very good at trust or relationships. It's in the telling that this novel runs aground. O'Farrell has a great story to tell, but since she gives the background of and center stage to so many secondary characters, from the children to a woman met on a holiday excursion, the story is so fractured it's hard to see the marriage at the center of the novel. Time is spent on both Daniel and Claudette, and on their relationships with the many people they were involved with at different stages of their lives,but little light is shone on their marriage, so that while I was interested in both Daniel and Claudette individually, I never saw why their marriage was important to either of them. In some writers' hands this approach of never showing the center of a novel directly can work, but here it just means that the book feels like it would have worked better as a series of unrelated short stories.
    • 4/5
      I really could have used a family tree in the beginning of the book to show who was who, especially when I had to leave the book for a week and try to pick it up and remember who was who later! I could absolutely picture what O'Farrell describes--the details of her characters, down to the tiniest "itch!" You know you're heading somewhere and finally....you get there.
    • 3/5
      This was my first of Maggie O'Farrell's books, and I picked it up with every intention of loving it. It's told in a disjointed style, with each chapter told by a new character (some of whom we meet only once) as well as jumping around in time, place, and narrative style. Some chapters are little jewels, so absorbing and self-contained they could have been stand-along short stories. Others (sadly, too often those featuring the main character) were a bit of a slog and the reason this book took me so long to finish. O'Farrell came highly recommended so I'll give some of her other works a try. But if you're a newbie, I wouldn't recommend starting with this one.
    • 3/5
      Daniel Sullivan offers up many "I am this man" assertions about himself and his defense of his life, but gives readers little reason to care. At parties, he is followed everywhere, but why? What was the draw?He has little sense of humor and only vague charisma.The book follows him through his 2 wives, 4 kids, and ex-girlfriend who he may or may not have killed.Back and forth in time sequences are so tiresome that it is easy to forget who the characters are. Interior monologues drag on way too long.Not until Teresa and Johnny's all too brief appearance was there a true spark of interest.The kids are sometimes finely tuned, but the mothers who produced them are not.Endless Claudette descriptions fail to illuminate her behavior.The best part for me is this quote: "There is a library down here that he likes, an old-school place with kids' story timesand stern librarians and clanking radiators and ancient computers and ancientcomputer and geriatrics dozing at tables." Sure wish there had been more of this!
    • 5/5
      This Must Be the Place was a fantastic read. I loved the story line, the characters and the resolution of the various story lines at the end. O’Farrell’s writing is absolutely stunning, and I was sad when the book ended. At times heartbreaking and at times funny, This Must Be the Place is definitely a must read.
    • 4/5
      I love Maggie O'Farrell's work, and this is a very strong portrait of a flawed man, seen from multiple viewpoints. Very close to being one of my favorite reads of 2016, but it slipped a little in the last quarter and I didn't quite buy the ending.
    • 4/5
      "What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.""We must pursue what's in front of us, not what we can't have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast." This is a charming story of family, love, loss, acceptance, and redemption. Told from multiple perspectives and multiple points of view, it jumps in time and locale perhaps a bit too much, but the story unfolds seamlessly nonetheless. The characters include Daniel, a slightly self-absorbed but genuinely kind alcoholic; his (second) wife Claudette, a beautiful actress who makes herself disappear when she tires of life in the limelight, and their respective children (his, hers, and theirs). The setting is primarily Ireland and New York but (to give you an idea of the somewhat random-feeling narrative arc) we also get to visit the Salar de Uyuni, a South American salt flat of vivid and inhospitable beauty. In any case, the characters are likable as well as flawed, the story is charming, and the truths are universal. An unsubtle, lovely read.
    • 3/5
      In a recent interview, Maggie O’Farrell admits, “I edited TV listings for about a year. I was probably the worst person in the world to do that. I didn’t watch TV and still don’t.” Ironically, her approach to storytelling seems to borrow heavily from what has been immensely popular on TV. We see the format in the reality shows and serials that have become standard fare on cable today. Of course the form has a long history dating back to the magazine serials popularized by Dickens in the 18 Century. It appeared again in the Saturday matinees of the early 20th Century, as soap operas in the latter part of the century, and all over Latin America today as telenovellas. These modes of storytelling have features in common. They are episodic, have compelling main characters, the plots maintain interest with cliffhangers and frequently outlandish elements, and they generate intense audience loyalty. People plan their lives around following them. In THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, O’Farrell gives us Daniel Sullivan and Claudette Wells, a couple who seem to be enjoying a somewhat off-kilter, but successful marriage that is beginning to show cracks. Daniel is a divorced linguistics scholar, who is estranged from his two children. Claudette is a former film star, who staged her own disappearance after becoming disenchanted with the celebrity lifestyle. They live in a remote area of Donegal with her son from a previous unsuccessful relationship and two children from their marriage. O’Farrell tells their story through a series of interlocking first, second and third person narratives. The writing is poised, the plots are engaging, the characterizations are rich and the settings are varied. Using assured non-linear pacing, she creates suspense and involvement for the reader. The urge to know what comes next and how these two people will resolve their problems becomes just as addictive as any reality TV show. Yet, these obvious strengths also seem to challenge achieving a coherent whole. Episodes are far-flung. They branch out from Donegal all over the world (Sussex, London, Scotland, Brooklyn, California, Chengdu, Bolivia, Goa). This eclecticism seems to add drama at the expense of focus. Likewise, there are a lot of characters in this novel and they all seem to be afflicted with some dreadful problem (stuttering, eczema, anorexia, agoraphobia, infertility, philandering mates, unfulfilling marriages, abortion and even murder). Once again, this adds drama, but at the expense of grounding. Daniel and Claudette’s backstories are so complex and strange that they are hard to relate and test the reader’s credulity. In the final analysis, one wonders why these two people can’t seem to resolve their issues and stay together. Despite superb storytelling and excellent character development, O’Farrell’s themes lack precision. How our past shapes our future, the importance of words and actions in families, the difficulty of really knowing another, the search for self, how relationships can decay. All of these are laudable themes but, seen together, they seem to have the vagueness that is the hallmark of reality TV.
    • 4/5
      Another success from one of my favourite authors."There is a man..........There is a man and the man is me"What an amazing way to start a novel; so simple, yet so precise.Maggie O'Farrell is a beautiful writer and I was disappointed to find that I hadn't highlighted more of her prose as I read this book.The man is Daniel Sullivan, an American linguist with a failed marriage behind him and two children he hasn't seen for many years. When we meet him he is married to Claudette, a reclusive woman with a colourful past.I don't really want to say too much because the whole pleasure of this book is to gradually unravel all the parts of this puzzle and put them together as a whole.The characterisations are excellent, but it is a bit of a cast of thousands, many of whom get to have their own say, and I did start to feel as if I should have taken notes. It's a complex interaction of emotions, sometimes frustrating, sometimes just wonderful. An insider's view of a marriage, with all its flaws.I think Maggie O'Farrell is the only author for whom I have read every book she's written. Only one didn't quite make the grade for me. This Must be the Place has joined her excellent writing and was another joy to read.Also read:The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (5 stars)After You'd Gone (5 stars)My Lover's Lover (3 stars)The Distance Between Us (4.5 stars)The Hand That First Held Mine (5 stars)Instructions for a Heatwave (4 stars)
    • 5/5
      It is rare that I am able to give the following compliment; Ms. O'Farrell has me lounging in bliss from the elegance of her writing. Moreover she is writing about a linguist, Daniel Sullivan. Daniel seems a bit clueless about many things and winds up getting a DNA blast from the past that rocks his world. There is much humor, which I adore. I need to check out her other offerings. My thanks to the author and the Penguin First to Read program for a complimentary copy.
    • 3/5
      Daniel Sullivan has not been good to his women, starting with his college girlfriend and ending with his current wife. He doesn’t know a good thing when it’s staring him in the face. This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell, author of Instructions for a Heatwave, is primarily his story.O’Farrell uses time skipping to show current and past circumstances of both Daniel’s and his current wife, reclusive former film star Claudette Wells’ relationships to their parents, spouses, siblings, etc.The locales shift among Donegal, Ireland (where he and Claudette live), Brooklyn (where his parents live), Los Angeles (where his ex-wife and children live) and England (where he went to college). The story begins with Daniel traveling back to Brooklyn for his father’s funeral, a father he never really got along with. On the spur of the moment, he diverts his travels to Los Angeles to see the children he hasn’t seen in ten years, initially because his ex-wife wouldn’t allow it and later because of the distance separating them. His travels then take him to England in search of answers to a question plaguing him about a former girlfriend–much to Claudette’s dismay. This was a pivotal point in their relationship.This Must Be the Place is all about relationships; Daniel’s with girlfriends, spouses, friends, family and Claudette’s with her former lover, her brother and Daniel.One very disconcerting technique O’Farrell uses is the “…little did he/she know that such and such happens to this particular character later on…”, supposedly making the current action more meaningful. I just found it annoying.I liked Claudette, Daniel not so much, their respective children somewhat interesting. I can’t say that I loved. This Must Be the Place, but I did finish it (predictable ending) so that must mean something. I guess my problem was that not liking Daniel made it difficult to want to know what happens to him. Juxtaposing that, liking Claudette made me want to finish the book…which I guess ultimately won out.To conclude, having really liked Instructions for a Heatwave, I found This Must Be the Place somewhat disappointing.
    • 4/5
      This Must Be the Place tells the story of Daniel Sullivan, a man who is living a happy life until one day he finds out something about a woman he knew 20 years ago that sends his life completely off-course and leaves him adrift. I must admit that the blurb didn't appeal to me that much and had it not been for the fact that a new Maggie O'Farrell novel is a must-have for me, I probably wouldn't have been drawn to this book at all.In fact, I really enjoyed it. In a way it's one of those non-story novels, where there isn't an obvious plot and is more of a slice of life story. But what a slice of life! It covers what amounts to a period between the 1940s to the current day but in a fragmented fashion. If you like your books in a linear, easy to follow, chronological order then this book is definitely not for you. Personally I love a book that roams around and where I have to think about how each bit fits in with the other bits. This book is something of a sweeping epic with very real and fallible characters. And what really shines through, as we follow all the ups and downs of the characters, is the quality of the writing which is what ultimately made this book a page turner for me.
    • 5/5
      I absolutely loved this book, which is kind of funny because when I first started reading it I wasn't sure if I would even like it. Oh, the writing was brilliant right from the start, but anyone reading my reviews knows how frustrating I find jumping timelines. This book does it alot, the past, the present, the future, sometimes skipping several years and introducing new characters. At the heart this is the story of Claudette and Daniel, fell in love with Daniel in all his maddening humanness, but was worried that the way this was written would keep me from getting closer to understanding the characters. But in this author's capable hands it all worked for me, I could see how amazingly she built this story, that eventually all, even that which seemed unnecessary at the time, has meaning and taken together I felt I received a wonderful look at two people and their marriage.,What struck me about this book is how flawed these people were, so real, the pasts that took them to the present, and the roadblocks, the unexpected role of fate, and how it can derail even the best intentioned. How difficult it is to overcome these twists and how despairing a person can become, how hard to look positive at a future. It was their very real humanness and very realistic problems and happenings that made me love this book. The characters, even the lesser characters were amazing, all coping with very real life and its incidentals. Loved the children, even their personalities were wonderfully formed, their defects very real. At books end I felt I was given a very insightful look at a marriage, at two lives, how they were formed and the mistakes and triumphs of full if not always happy lives lived. This author is a true treasure.ARC from publisher.