The flea chapter.

The flea chapter. I have been telling people about the flea chapter since March and I'm aware that is an odd way to sell a novel about a dead child, but it's the part that made me put the book face down on my knees and look out of the window for a while.

For anyone who hasn't read it: there's a section that follows the plague from a monkey in Alexandria to a glassmaker's apprentice to a box of Murano beads to a house in Warwickshire, and it runs about twelve pages, and not one of the people in it matters to the story at all. It's the finest thing in the book and it is about nobody.

The rest of it. Agnes is very good indeed — the kestrel, the hedgerow medicine, the accuracy about how a woman like that would be regarded and used and feared in roughly equal measure by the same neighbours. O'Farrell never once names Shakespeare, which sounds like a gimmick and has stopped feeling like one well before you're thirty pages in.

I found the last section, the performance, a little too neatly closed. I know why it is there. I'd have taken it a few pages shorter and slightly less resolved.

I read it over one weekend in March with the wind doing something violent to the fence, and I cried twice, once in the obvious place and once at something to do with a bed being moved, which I have since gone back and been unable to find again.

Nine. My sister thinks it's a ten and she may well be right; she usually is about endings.