Book review: This Must Be The Place

NORTHERN Irish author Maggie O’Farrell has, since she wrote the After You’d Gone, revealed a knack for capturing the bald truths of marriage in all their spiky, broken, loving fragments.

This Must Be The Place is just as well executed, the story of alcoholic Daniel and his sprawling, fractured family, punctuated heavily by the pull of his enigmatic and reclusive former-movie star wife, Claudette.

It leaps from New York to Ireland to France and Scandinavia as Daniel’s world is shattered, first by an ex-girlfriend’s voice caught on the radio, and second, by a pitilessly fired bullet.