Maggie O’Farrell Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Picture Books

Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell was born in 1972 in Coleraine Northern Ireland. It is possible to identify many common themes in her work, like loss, the psychological impact of these losses on the lives of her characters, and the relationship between sisters.

“After You’d Gone won a Betty Trask Award. “The Distance Between Us” won a Somerset Maugham Award, while “The Hand That First Held Mine” won a Costa Novel Award in 2010. Her novel “Hamnet” is a Waterstones Book of the Year. “Instructions for a Heatwave” and “This Must Be The Place” were each shortlisted for Costa Novel Awards.

Ideas can come to Maggie from anywhere, often when you are least expecting it. It can be something that she overhears, has been told, something she has dreamt, or read about. She keeps a special notebook, where she write down any scenarios or ideas that strike her as interesting. When she is feeling a dearth of inspiration, she will flip through it.

Maggie’s debut novel, called “After You’d Gone”, was released in the year 2000. Her work is from the historical, literary fiction, and children’s fiction genres.

“After You’d Gone” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2000. Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland for a visit with her family, however when she gets there she witnesses something that is so stunning that she returns to London immediately. Just a few hours later and she is in a coma after an accident that might or might not have been a suicide attempt.

Alice’s family gets together at her bedside while they argue, wait, and remember, long-buried tensions start to emerge. The more they get to talking, the more they appear to hide. Alice slides between different levels of consciousness, remembering her past and a love affair that ended recently.

This is a riveting tale that skips through time and it interweaves multiple perspectives, and is a novel of stunning psychological depth, marking the debut of a major literary talent. With incredible depth and honesty, Maggie combines a tragic love story with tension filled moments of suspense mixed cleverly with the ingredients of coincidence and chance. It is an ambitious debut novel that promises to break the hearts of those that search through the truths lying inside its pages.

“My Lover’s Lover” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2002. Lily meets Marcus at a gallery opening in London, and she is immediately attracted to him. In just under a week, she falls madly in love with the magnetic yet elusive architect and moves into his echoing loft apartment in East London.

Nothing could possibly have prepared Lily for what she finds there. A distinct presence of another woman lingers in this loft, one that appears to have vanished quickly, leaving behind one party dress hanging in the closet, the suffocating scent of jasmine, and a puzzling mark on the wall. Lily’s unsettling curiosity becomes obsession as the spirit of this mysterious woman increasingly haunts her.

Who was she? What were the circumstances of her sudden disappearance? Marcus refuses to talk about this woman or her fate. Aidan, the other inhabitant of the apartment, appears to comprehend Lily’s concern, however he is unwilling to provide further information.

“This Must Be the Place” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 2016. A love story that crisscrosses time zones and continents while it captures an extraordinary marriage, with an unforgettable with humor, wit, and deep affection.

Meet Daniel Sullivan, who is a man with a complex life. A New Yorker that lives in the wilds of Ireland, he has kids that he never sees in California, a dad he loathes in Brooklyn, and a wife, named Claudette, who is a reclusive former film star that is given to pull a gun on anybody that ventures up their driveway. She was once the most infamous and glamorous woman in cinema before staging her disappearance and retreated to blissful seclusion in an Irish farmhouse.

However the life Claudette and Daniel have carefully constructed is about to be disrupted by an unexpected discovery about a woman that Daniel lost touch with twenty years prior. This revelation is going to send him off-course, far away from his wife, kids, and home. Is his love for Claudette going to be enough to bring him back?

Maggie delivers a novel about identity, family, and true love. It is an intimately drawn portrait of marriage, both the pressures that drive it apart and the forces holding it together. She writes with insight, complexity, and laugh-out-loud humor in a narrative that hurtles onward with powerful velocity and emotion.

“Hamnet” is a stand alone novel that was released in the year 2020. Two extraordinary people and a love that draws them together. A loss that threatens to tear them apart.

On a summer’s day in the year 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon goes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, named Hamnet, looks everywhere for help. Why is no one at home? Their mom, Agnes, is more than a mile away, in the garden where she grows her medicinal herbs. Their dad works in London. Neither one of their parents knows that one of the kids is not going to survive the week.

Hamnet is a novel that was inspired by a famous playwright’s son. It is the tale of the bond between twins, and about a marriage pushed to the very brink by grief. It is also the tale of a kestrel and its mistress; a glovemaker’s son who flouts convention in pursuit of a woman he loves, and a flea that boards a ship in Alexandria. Above all, it is an unforgettable and tender re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, however whose names was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

The writing is immersive, exquisite, compelling, and stunning. The story of Hamnet Shakespeare has been waiting in the shadows for more than four centuries, and Maggie brings it devastatingly, dazzlingly into the spotlight.