The flea chapter is worth the price on its own.

The chapter which traces the plague from a monkey in Alexandria, through a glassmaker's boy, onto a ship, along a route, into a house in Warwickshire. Everyone praises it and I am agree with all of them. It's a piece of writing which does something no summary of the book would suggest is possible, and it arrives out of nowhere, and then the novel goes back to being what it was.

Agnes is the real subject. Not the husband, who is never once named, which is a decision I admire more than I enjoy. She keeps bees, she knows plants, she can read people by holding a hand, and O'Farrell manages to write all of that without making her either a witch or a saint.

Eight. My reservation is about the grief itself, which occupies the last third and which is described very beautifully several times over. Beautifully and then again beautifully. I felt the book insisting, and once I felt the insisting I stopped being moved and started admiring the sentences, which is not the same and is arguably worse.

Read it in autumn. It's a house-and-weather book and it does not want to be read in June, which is of course when I read it. Why do I do this every single year?