Excerpt from This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My wife, I should tell you, is crazy. Not in a requiring-medication-and-wards-and-men-in-white-coats sense although I sometimes wonder if there may have been times in her past—but in a subtle, more socially acceptable, less ostentatious way. She -doesn't think like other people. She believes that to pull a gun on someone lurking, in all likelihood entirely innocently, at our perimeter fence is not only permissible but indeed the right thing to do.

Here are the bare facts about the woman I married:
—She's crazy, as I might have mentioned.
—She's a recluse.

She's apparently willing to pull a gun on anyone threatening to uncover her hiding place.
I dart, insomuch as a man of my size can dart, through the house to catch her. I'm going to have this out with her. She can't keep a gun in a house where there are small children. She just can't.

I'm repeating this to myself as I pass through the house, planning to begin my protestations with it. But as I come through the front door, it's as if I'm entering another world. Instead of the gray drizzle at the back, a dazzling, primrose-tinted sun fills the front garden, which gleams and sparks as if hewn from jewels. My daughter is leaping over a rope that her mother is -turning. My wife who, just a moment ago, was a dark, forbidding figure with a gun, a long gray coat, and a hat like Death's hood, she has shucked off the sou'wester and transmogrified back to her usual incarnation. The baby is crawling on the grass, knees wet with rain, the bloom of an iris clutched in his fist, chattering to himself in a satisfied, guttural growl.

It's as if I've stepped into another time frame entirely, as if I'm in one of those folktales where you think you've been asleep for an hour or so, but you wake to find you've been away a lifetime, that all your loved ones and everything you've ever known are dead and gone. Did I -really just walk in from the other side of the house, or did I fall asleep for a hundred years?

I shake off this notion. The gun business needs to be dealt with right now. "Since when," I demand, "do we own a firearm?"

My wife raises her head and meets my eye with a challenging, flinty look, the skipping rope coming to a stop in her hand. "We don't," she says. "It's mine."

A typical parry from her. She appears to answer the question without answering it at all. She picks on the element that isn't the subject of the question. The essence of sidestepping.

I rally. I've had more than enough practice. "Since when do you own a firearm?"

She shrugs a shoulder, bare, I notice, and tanned to a soft gold, bisected by a thin white strap. I feel a momentary automatic mobilization deep inside my underwear—strange how this doesn't change with age for men, that we're all of us but a membrane away from our inner teenage selves—but I pull my attention back to the discussion. She's not going to get away with this.

"Since now," she says.

"What's a fire arm?" my daughter asks, splitting the word in two, her small, heart-shaped face tilted up to look at her mother.

"It's an Americanism," my wife says. "It means 'gun.'"

"Oh, the gun," says my sweet Marithe, six years old, equal parts pixie, angel, and sylph. She turns to me. "Father Christmas brought Donal a new one, so he said Maman could have his old one."

This utterance renders me, for a moment, speechless. Donal is an -ill--scented homunculus who farms the land farther down the valley. He—and his wife, I'd imagine—have what you might call a problem with anger management. Somewhat trigger-happy, Donal. He shoots everything on sight: squirrels, rabbits, foxes, -hill walkers (just kidding).

"What is going on?" I say. "You're keeping a firearm in the house and—"

Excerpted from This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell. Copyright © 2016 by Maggie O'Farrell. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.