This Must Be the Place

Author/Guide: Maggie O'Farrell

Why a Booktrail?

Various : Across time zones, continents, countries and moments in life, this is the epic story of a marriage and of a life journey itself.

ISBN: 978-0755358809
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

Daniel Sullivan must have one of the complicated lives known to man. He is a man of circumstance and the effects of time. A New Yorker by birth he now lives in rural Ireland, has children he never sees in California, a father he rather loathes in Brooklyn and a wife, Claudette who has a very interesting history of her own.

Claudette is a reclusive former film star whose live is perhaps more vivid than any of the roles she’s portrayed on screen. She and Daniel have a marriage which has stood the test of time – or has it? As the veil lifts from the bride, and also from the marriage, the real picture starts to emerge.

Then there’s the other woman – the woman Daniel lost touch with 20 years ago. He learns what became of her and when he does he starts to question everything about himself and how one thread, one relationship can unravel a lifetime of regret and deep thought.

Locations

Reset

Ireland
A: Donegal

America/ USA
B: California

India
E: Goa

Travel Guide

This must be the place doesn’t just span continents and countries, this is a world wide epic read from a different time and place to another, from one character’s point of view to another, the moments of your life flashing before your very eyes.

You’ll feel like you’re a frequent flyer on this ride, racking up those points and meeting everyone – the cast – in various snapshots during their lives. Reading this is as if you’re a photographer flying from one place to another with a name,date and place, the chapter headings as your card – take a look, take your snapshot of their lives, and whoosh you’re off again on the next assignment.

But as you travel, you build a remarkable picture of Daniel and his wife Claudette, their friends and acquaintances to see how a marriage can wilt and whither something so broken can ever be repaired.
Claudette goes on a tour for her film career – spending time in places as far apart as Goa and Chengdu. Always brought back to her birth city of Paris, this must be the place for her it would seem.

But it’s the portrait of a life, of a man searching for his place in the world, leaving people behind and searching for answers that is the real journey here. What he left behind in Scotland in 1986 however comes back to haunt him. This must be the place where his old life ended and a different one began.

Booktrailer Review

Louise: @thebooktrailer

Maggie O’Farrell is someone that I just enjoy reading. She could write anything really and I would believe her. Her acute observations and revealing prose is like opening a jigsaw puzzle, wrapped in a silk ribbon and then having her watch as you put the pieces together to reveal what she has had in her head all along.

It’s interesting that Claudette is a film star as this reads like a series of vignettes which fade in and out on each new scene and character, each flaw, each movement of their heads means something in Maggie’s world. Actions speak louder than words could have been a subtitle here for it’s what people do, not say that creates the biggest ripple on the pond.

I even feel more poetic after reading this. This is what Maggie O’Farrell does to me – makes me think more lyrically about life in general. The range of plot lines, locations and observations makes this a book to spend time with – and this must be the place I think could also mean that you need to pick you own reading space as you meander through your reading with Maggie’s characters, getting to know how they tick, how they think and how they all end up as they do.

Some very neat and clever observations here – the wedding, the chaos on the various film sets, the way on which a wife can sniff out a lie…

This must be the place to say how much I enjoyed slowly reading about these people, flying all over the world through time and space to do it as I slowly put together the pieces, then sat back and looked at the full picture. It was then that I realised just what an amazing journey I had been on.