A reclusive French film star, her American linguist husband, and their exes, parents, siblings, and children from various marriages feature in a sophisticated story about love. In an interlocking series of narratives set from 1944 to 2016, in places ranging from Sussex to Goa to Brooklyn, with titles like "The Tired Mind Is a Stovetop," "How a Locksmith Must Feel," and "When All the Tiny Lights Begin to Be Extinguished," British novelist O'Farrell (Instructions for A Heat Wave, 2013, etc.) unfolds the history of Daniel Sullivan and Claudette Wells. After being discovered in her early 20s by a Swedish film director, Claudette became an international icon and obsession on the most extreme scale possibleuntil the day she disappeared so completely she was assumed dead. Actually, she was hiding at a remote location in Donegal, where unhappy Berkeley professor Daniel, in Ireland to collect his grandfather's ashes, finds her broken down by the side of the road. From that literal and figurative intersectionas the title says, "this must be the place"the story shoots out in many directions, past and future. Almost every character struggles with some burdensome disabilitystuttering, eczema, anorexia, agoraphobia, infertilityand yet all have a magnetic star quality courtesy of O'Farrell's excellent characterizations. The scenario is glamorous, the writing is stylish, the globe-trotting almost dizzying, but there's a satisfying core of untempered feeling as well. Here's Daniel, reunited with Claudette after a separation: "I don't think our language contains a word with sufficient largesse or capacity to express the euphoria I feel as I bury my face in her hair.What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another." Or sister-in-law Maeve, upon picking up her adopted daughter in Chengdu, China: "If she was a liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breather her in; if she was a pill, she would down her; a dress, she would wear her; a plate, she would lick her clean." Juicy and cool, this could be O'Farrell's U.S. breakthrough book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Recently divorced and unhappy about his separation from his two children, American linguist Daniel Sullivan is ready for a new start. Driving around Donegal, Ireland, in search of his grandfather's remains, he happens upon a young boy with a stutter. That Daniel is able to offer him some relief from his condition leads to a meeting with the boy's mother, Claudette Wells, a reclusive Hollywood legend, who mysteriously disappeared from public view years earlier. A marriage and two more children later, Daniel's life spirals out of control again after he catches part of a radio conversation with a long-ago girlfriend whose early death he may have caused. Seeking answers, he allows his life to fall apart for the second time. Verdict As the narrative moves effortlessly around in time and unfolds from multiple viewpoints (even the cameo roles are compelling), Daniel's backstory comes patchily into focus. Fans of O'Farrell's previous novels, such as The Hand That First Held Mine and Instructions for a Heatwave, can look forward to this fine new offering from a gifted storyteller. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/16.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Can two fragile individuals weave a life together when their fractured pasts threaten to unravel the tapestry of their marriage, thread by single thread? Daniel and Claudette Sullivan are tortured souls who find each other in one of the most remote villages of Ireland. The relationship is in danger of coming undone when a crime Daniel is sure he committed casts a looming shadow. For her part, Claudette is fleeing from celluloid fame and hiding from her ex-husband when she finds succor in her marriage to Daniel. O'Farrell (Instructions for a Heatwave, 2013) tells an enchanting story through the points of view of a sizable assortment of characters as the plot moves back and forth in time. The chorus of voices and the constant time-frame switching occasionally threaten the clarity of the narrative, but the flawless language (My life has been a series of elisions, cover-ups, dropped stitches in knitting) and the attention to nuance override any flaws. One memorable chapter is devoted to a wedding in the Scottish countryside, a piece of writing so finely wrought, the novel is worth reading for this vignette alone. Even the slightly trite ending doesn't mar this compelling portrait of a marriage.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2016 Booklist

O'Farrell (The Vainishing Act of Esme Lennox) spins a magical story in her new novel. On the surface, the story is about the unlikely meeting of Daniel, an American, and Claudette, a French-English former actress; the life they make together; the lives they lived before that. and their struggle to hold things together in the face of a secret from Daniel's past. But this description, though accurate, doesn't convey the depth of perception and detail. O'Farrell offers not just backstory, but surround-story, using first-, second- and third-person points of view to depict Daniel and Claudette's children, Daniel's mother, Claudette's brother and his wife, an ex-lover or two, a former friend, a bewildered assistant, and a woman Daniel meets by chance in the Bolivian high plains (who has her own story of betrayal). Across the present and the recent and more distant pasts, in Donegal, Ireland; Brooklyn; London; Sussex, England; and points south and east, relationships start, end, and last. There is enough possibility and randomness for three books, yet the story never feels overstuffed, and when it ends, the reader is stunned and grateful, relieved that in the face of all that can go (and have gone) wrong, some things have come right. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

TWO REMARKABLE POEMS written in the latter half of the 20 th century - Wislawa Szymborska's "Could Have" and Jane Kenyon's "Otherwise" - address the shadow Iife that presses itself against us in every living moment. "It could have happened. / It had to happen"; so begins the Szymborska. "I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise," is the opening of Kenyon's. The poets remind us that our lives are at the mercy of near misses, catastrophes averted. We make our peace with this present danger - or we don't. We embrace those we love more ferociously knowing we're not in control of their fates, or ours - or we don't. The Northern Irish novelist Maggie O'Farrell is consumed with this shadow life in her transfixing "I Am I Am I Am," a memoir that trains its fierce intelligence on her 17 near-death experiences. O'Farrell is acutely aware that her inner and outer worlds have been shaped at least as powerfully by what didn't happen as what did. In chapters with titles like "Neck," "Lungs," "Cranium" and "Bloodstream," inscripted above intricate black-and-white drawings of the body part in question, Farrell cuts through swaths of her life, using this anatomical structure to great effect as she builds tension and portent. At age 18, she encounters a stranger on a deserted country path and senses "the urge for violence radiating off the man, like heat off a stone." She evades him thanks to her preternatural instinct for danger, but her police report carries little weight. Soon thereafter he murders a different young woman. "It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that I think about her, if not every day then most days," writes the adult O'Farrell, the would-be victim who has survived to tell the tale. "I am aware of her life, which was cut off, curtailed, snipped short, whereas mine, for whatever reason, was allowed to run on." This awareness - of time, luck, fate and "the feeling of having pulled my head, one more time, out of the noose" - drives O'Farrell's story. She reminds us that we all live a hairbreadth from death. At times she shifts skillfully from first- to secondperson narration as if to implore the reader to understand that there is no protection, nor order, nor safety. Not for her, not for us. In brief chapters that can stand alone but create a resounding effect when read together, she recounts a near drowning, a violent mugging, a terrifying childbirth, a plunging jetliner. The midlife writer also describes her youthful risk-taking: Her own mother tells her, these days, that she was "a nightmare to rear." This maternal admonition gains a piercing resonance as the wild child becomes a mother herself, and "I Am I Am I Am" is at its strongest when she describes the intensity of her love and sense of responsibility for her own three children, and her fear of unwittingly putting them in harm's way. Her daughter is born with an immune-system disorder and an array of terrifying allergies. Anaphylaxis, O'Farrell tells us, means "without protection." The little girl who once sought danger has grown into a parent who lives "in a state of high alert." If I have a quibble with this book, it's that there are a few spots where O'Farrell's wise and lyrical voice veers toward the didactic, including footnotes and journalistic asides that distract from the deep emotional resonance. In the end, this memoir is a mystical howl, a thrumming, piercing reminder of how very closely we all exist alongside what could have happened, but didn't. DANI SHAPIRO is the author, most recently, of "Hourglass."