Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.

Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.