Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

‘What else is there to say? That I loved him more than I ever thought it was possible to love anyone.’

After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell

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One thing I kept thinking about while reading After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell were the words of a colleague, “The truth will out.” He had said this more than a decade ago when we were discussing certain politicians involved with atrocities and corruption. His belief was that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, or in what form, but no matter what, the truth will come out. It’s something I come back to these days as we flail in this purgatory of misinformation. What […]

I seem to read a lot of novels about grief

After You’d Gone: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell has a knack for writing about grief. All of the novels of hers that I have read have dealt with strong-willed, unusual women, their love lives, and their grief and sorrow (Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox). After You’d Gone is O’Farrell’s first novel and while perhaps not as polished or finished as her later works, it still kept me glued to the text and broke my heart. It is the story of 29-year-old Alice Raikes who, when the […]

Difficult Women

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell is one of my favorite contemporary writers. She has a great talent for historical fiction (read Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait), and she excels at telling stories of women who find themselves in untenable positions. In The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Esme is a woman who, like Agnes in Hamnet and Lucrezia in The Marriage Portrait, is unusual in ways that make her seem dangerous to those around her. She does not conform to conventional traditional female roles and, as we know […]

“Was there no hope? the tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?”

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

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When Lucrezia, the third daughter of the Duke of Florence, is wed to Alfonso d’Este, she’s not sure what to expect – but whatever it was, it was certainly not that he was going to want her dead before they’d been married a year. I haven’t read Maggie O’Farrell’s work before, but she’s been on my radar after the success of Hamnet, and so when I saw The Marriage Portrait offered as a ‘lucky day’ loan from my library, I snapped it up. Hurrah for […]

Of Mice and Metaphors

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

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In a small Warwickshire village, an eleven year old succumbs to the plague. The year is 1596; the boy’s name is Hamnet. His father, who remains nameless throughout the book, goes on to write a famous play about a young Danish prince, while his mother stays behind with the boy’s sisters, trying to pick up the pieces of their life.  Hamnet is about a side of Shakespeare we rarely get a glimpse of, mostly because not a lot is known about it save for a […]

Oh, the foreboding!

The Marriage Portrait: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell’s last two novels have been works of historical fiction that deal with heavy topics. In Hamnet, it was the death of William Shakespeare’s young son from the plague, and in The Marriage Portrait it is the death of the 15-year-old Duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia de’Medici, thought to have been murdered by her own husband. O’Farrell is a master of foreboding, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat while waiting for the horrid event to occur. And yet, despite the fact that […]



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