The Marriage Portrait was an excellent historical fiction read, especially for those who love renaissance era novels. Reading the reimagined story of Lucrezia de'Medici (married off to a Duke at 13, and dead by age 17), I was transported to the time when I used to inhale Philippa Gregory paperbacks- set in a similar timeframe of Tudor England. 
I last read Maggie O’Farrell years ago, and it was one of her contemporary fiction novels. This felt like a departure, but I still recognized her style of pulling several narrative threads together for a story that culminates in such a satisfying way. The plot tantalizingly shifts back and forth in time between Lucrezia’s childhood and the fraught moments in the future where she is convinced her husband is trying to kill her. O’Farrell really pulls the reader along as the tension in the story comes to a crescendo. It read like a psychological thriller. Though I wasn’t completely surprised by the ending, it was a simultaneously lyrical and intense journey to get there.

“Sadness keeps attempting to tie weights to her wrists and ankles, therefore she has to keep moving, she has no to outpace it. And so she walks, along one terrace then another, from one battlement to the next”