Quite simply this novel is about motherhood, the ups and downs, the anxieties, but always the devotion. However, there is nothing simple about Maggie O’Ferrell’s writing. She writes in technicolor, creating scenes in my mind that I’ll never forget. She’s vastly descriptive with every scene, e...
Authors who love their characters too much – on the next Oprah.It happens to be a pet peeve of mine when authors seem to live out their narcissistic fantasies by creating mythically attractive characters who inspire desperate passion in all who see them. Aside from everything else, in my experie...
Maggie O'Farrell's three previous novels have been respectfully reviewed, but her new one radiates the kind of energy that marks a classic. Think Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea: stories that illuminate the suffering quietly ...
My heart has taken it upon itself to perform a series of trips or tricks inside my ribcage: a type of cardiac pratfall. It has decided to miss or stumble over every tenth or eleventh beat. The effect is one of unremitting anxiety, interspersed with spikes of panic. I have to press my hand to my c...
A mad decision in the heat, even at this time of day. But the roads had been choked when he’d emerged aboveground, the buses stranded in traffic, wheels motionless on the softening tarmac, so he’d set off along the pavement, between the houses that seemed to transpire heat from their very bricks,...