An irresistible love story, an unforgettable family. The New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet captures an extraordinary marriage with insight and laugh-out-loud humor in what Richard Russo calls “her breakout book.”   Daniel Sullivan leads a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and his wife, Claudette, is a reclusive ex–film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway. Together, they have made an idyllic life in the country, but a secret from Daniel’s past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home. Shot through with humor and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is an irresistible love story that crisscrosses continents and time zones as it captures an extraordinary marriage, and an unforgettable family, with wit and deep affection. “Intensely absorbing. . . . O’Farrell writes novels in which you can happily lose yourself.” —NPR “Compassionate. . . . Few contemporary writers equal Maggie O’Farrell’s gift for combining intricate, engrossing plots with full-bodied characterizations.” — The Washington Post   “Heartfelt.” — Vogue “Marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time.” — The New York Times Book Review   “Extraordinary. . . . An engrossing novel . . . from a writer of impressive, perhaps masterly, skills.” — The Washington Times MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You’d Gone , The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox , The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave . She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death . She lives in Edinburgh. This Must Be the Place Maggie O'Farrell The Strangest Feeling in My Legs Daniel Donegal, 2010 There is a man. He’s standing on the back step, rolling a cigarette. The day is typically unstable, the garden lush and shining, the branches weighty with still-falling rain.  There is a man and the man is me. I am at the back door, tobacco tin in hand, and I am watching something in the trees, a figure, standing at the perimeter of the garden, where the aspens crowd in at the fence. Another man. He’s carrying a pair of binoculars and a camera. A -bird--watcher, I am telling myself as I pull the frail paper along my tongue, you get them in these parts. But at the same time I’m thinking, -Really? -Bird--watching, this far up the valley? I’m also thinking, Where is my daughter, the baby, my wife? How quickly could I reach them, if I needed to? My heart cranks into high gear, -thud--thudding against my ribs. I squint into the white sky. I am about to step out into the garden. I want the guy to know I’ve seen him, to see me seeing him. I want him to register my size, my former -track--and--field--star physique (slackening and loosening a little, these days, admittedly). I want him to run the odds, me versus him, through his head. He’s not to know I’ve never been in a fight in my life and intend it to stay that way. I want him to feel what I used to feel before my father disciplined me: I am on to you, he would say, with a pointing finger, directed first at his chest, then mine. I am on to you, I want to yell while I fumble to pocket my cigarette and lighter. The guy is looking in the direction of the house. I see the tinder spark of sun on a lens and a movement of his arm that could be the brushing away of a hair across the forehead or the depression of a camera shutter. Two things happen very fast. The dog—a whiskery, leggy, slightly arthritic wolfhound, usually given to sleeping by the stove— streaks out of the door, past my legs, and into the garden, emitting a volley of low barks, and a woman comes around the side of the house. She has the baby on her back, she is wearing the kind of sou’wester hood usually sported by North Sea fishermen, and she is holding a shotgun. She is also my wife. The latter fact I still have trouble adjusting to, not only because the idea of this creature ever agreeing to marry me is highly improbable, but also because she pulls unexpected shit like this all the time. “Jesus, honey,” I gasp, and I am momentarily distracted by how shrill my voice is. “Unmanly” -doesn’t cover it. I sound as if I’m admonishing her for an -ill--judged choice in soft furnishings or for wearing pumps that clash with her purse. She ignores my high-pitched intervention—who can blame her?—and fires into the air. Once, twice. If, like me, you’ve never heard a gun report at close range, let me tell you the noise is an ear shattering explosion. Magnesium-hued