On the first wet evening in several weeks, a thunderstorm cracked the skies just as Maggie O’Farrell began to read from her new novel. The title? “Instructions for a Heatwave”.
Well, we certainly have enjoyed a hot summer; visitors to the Edinburgh International Book Festival have lounged on deckchairs in the garden enjoying ice-cream, a glass of wine and sandwiches.
In 2010, Maggie won the Costa Award for "The Hand that First Held Mine", and this is her sixth novel, set in July 1976. For those who can remember, there was a serious heatwave and drought across the UK.
Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he is just popping out to buy a paper. But when he doesn’t return, their three adult children have to return home to help their mother and face the truth to find out why he has disappeared.
In this lively event, presented with great humour by Jackie McGlone, we hear about Maggie’s Celtic nomad childhood, moving from Ireland to Wales to Scotland.
She was just four years old in 1976 but remembers wearing her sun hat and hearing the story of Alice in Wonderland, which begins on a hot day.
She reads a chapter which wittily describes the episode when Gretta’s son Michael meets his girlfriend’s family for the first time – the polite middle class manners, the covered vegetable dishes on the lunch table, civilised conversation – compared to his own regular family arguments.
Maggie explains how she tackles the plot of a novel, developing, changing, distilling the voices and characters in the arc of the story. She loves reading, especially Margaret Atwood, William Boyd and Alice Munro, and re-reads Mrs Dalloway every year.
Most fascinating was her anecdote about attending an Arvon foundation creative writing course. Amongst a small group of aspiring writers, they were given professional tuition by writers, Elspeth Barker and Barbara Trapido.
After submitting her work one day, she was asked to see the tutors after supper. “Oh, no”, she thought, “I have failed, they will throw me off the course.! “
But she was completely wrong. They thought the young Maggie O'Farrell was a terrific writer, advised to finish her novel and they would send it to their literary agents. The rest is history!
“Instructions for a Heatwave” by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press, 2013)