The summer read of 2023 from the bestselling author of HAMNET and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT
‘The Riordans will stay in your mind long after you finish this book. They’re funny, infuriating and impossible not to love. They feel like family’ Irish Times
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It’s July 1976. In London, it hasn’t rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he’s going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta’s children – two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce – back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.
‘The Riordans will stay in your mind long after you finish this book. They’re funny, infuriating and impossible not to love. They feel like family’ Irish Times
_______
It’s July 1976. In London, it hasn’t rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he’s going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta’s children – two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce – back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.
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Reviews
The Riordans will stay in your mind long after you finish this book. They're funny, infuriating and impossible not to love. They feel like family
My favourite kind of novel: big-hearted, psychologically complex and utterly gripping
Unputdownable
Instantly appealing...magical
Masterful...holds you on an exquisite knife-edge
An author at the top of her game
O'Farrell's language is lissom, airborne, mostly seamless, her characters flawed, contradictory, aggravating and instantly knowable. This is a deceptively easy, effortlessly true-feeling novel; a total delight
A quite wonderful novel...at once enthralling, page turning and atmospheric
An accomplished debut that excellently conveys the experience of being deaf in a hearing world. A Sign of Her Own gives a fascinating insight into a moment in history when the invention of the telephone was poised to connect countless people, yet deaf communities were being silenced by a movement against the use of sign language. Beautifully written, absorbing and illuminating