Dina Khatib’s Reviews > Hamnet > Status Update

“he can imagine her dark eyes on him, assessing, gathering information, like a spool gathers thread”

“she will see him for what he is, a man with his leg caught in the jaws of a trap”

“The problem is… that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.”

‘When,’ continues her brother, ‘has he ever exerted himself to give me something I want or need? When have you known him to act in my favour? When have you known him not to go deliberately out of his way to thwart me?’

“There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.”

“She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married.”

“She looks at him for a moment, raises her eyebrows very slightly, as if she has seen the spool of his thoughts, as if his head is transparent as water.”

“It is the girl with the bird! The very same… Right here, in front of him, as if he had summoned her presence by thought alone.”

“As an astronomer reads the minuscule shifts and alterations in the alignment of the planets and spheres, to see what lies in store, this eldest son became an expert in reading his father’s moods and expressions.”

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