Every time I get to the end of a Maggie O'Farrell novel, I want to scream, “More. What happened next?” O'Farrell always leaves me hanging and Instructions for a Heatwave was no exception. This is a family book, about adult children's frustrations, about efforts to be the “best child” of the three, about running away, about marriage or non-marriage. The adult children's problems are the true basis of this story, not about their run-away father. And it ends up about their relationships with the mother.

Only near the end of the book do we start to learn of the giant hypocrisy of the mother. There is envy, pity, frustration and anger, too. The father disappears – no note, no information for the mother. He just does not come back from getting the newspaper. The three children start gathering near the mother, when they can pull away from their own family/relationship dilemmas. The two sisters are not speaking to each other and have been this way for three years. Wow, how can you hang on to conflict and misunderstanding with your own sister for three years?

When one of the sisters discovers that daddy-dearest has been sending a steady stream of money, every month, to “Assumpta,” things really start to fall apart. These adult children start figuring out what has been happening or not happening with their parents and with each other. The book starts in London in the middle of a heat wave with water rationing and ends in Ireland where the parents were born. And it ends in hope. I can not write anymore because it would spoil your reading.