The flea chapter. Oh, the flea chapter.

I nearly didn't read this because I had got it into my head that it was a Shakespeare novel and I've had enough of those for one life. It isn't. He's in it constantly and never once named, and after about thirty pages you stop noticing the trick and simply accept that this is a book about his wife.

Agnes. She's the whole thing. Somebody who reads people by pressing the muscle between their thumb and first finger, who keeps a kestrel, who everyone in Stratford has decided is odd and who is, but not in the way they mean. O'Farrell gives her a kind of competence that historical novels rarely hand to women. She earns money, she makes decisions, she is right about things and it doesn't save her.

And then the chapter. If you have read it you know the one. The flea, the monkey, the glass-maker's boy on the ship, the whole route the plague takes from Alexandria to a house in Warwickshire, told as a sort of relay. Fifteen pages, give or take, and it does something I hadn't thought a novel could do, which is make an accident feel like weather instead of like plot. I read that on the 18:48 with the window black and I can still tell you exactly where I was, which almost never happens to me any more.

The middle sags. There's a stretch where Agnes is grieving and the prose goes lush and I found it harder to stay inside than the surrounding chapters, and I skimmed maybe six pages around the burial, which I feel mildly guilty about admitting.

But the last section. The last section is a woman travelling to London to confront her husband about what he has done with their dead child's name, and it lands in a playhouse, and I have not cried in public like that in about four years. Properly, not just the eyes going. A woman across the aisle passed me a tissue without saying anything and I've thought about that small kindness more than once since.

On my one actual criterion: this is not a book you can take in ten-minute pieces. I tried, early on, and it kept slipping away. It wants a whole run at it. So I saved it for the evenings when I knew nothing was going to be held at Hayes, and if that sounds like an odd way to organise a reading life, well, it's the one I have got.

Nine. Not ten, only because of the sag, and because I have now pushed it on four people and two of them bounced off the opening fifty pages, which makes me wonder how much of my score is the carriage and the dark and the fact that I got through it in one November week when I wasn't sleeping.