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Book Reviews

The real 'hamnet' died centuries ago, but this novel is timeless.

Heller McAlpin

In the 20 years since the publication of her first novel, After You'd Gone, Irish-born Maggie O'Farrell has wooed readers with intricately plotted, lushly imagined fiction featuring nonconformist women buffeted by the essential unpredictability of life, which can turn on a dime. O'Farrell's last book, I Am, I Am, I Am (2018), was a nonfiction account of her own unpredictable life, filtered through 17 dramatic, near-death experiences, from her hair-raising childhood through her middle child's harrowing, periodic anaphylactic attacks brought on by a life-threatening immunological disorder.

With her eighth novel, O'Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent's worst nightmare: the death of a child. Set in Stratford, England, in the late 16th century, Hamnet imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world's most famous (though never named) playwright and his wife lose their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, to the bubonic plague in 1596. Four years later, the boy's father transposes his grief into his masterpiece — titled with a common variant of his son's name — in which the father dies and the son lives to avenge him.

O'Farrell's narratives are rarely straightforwardly chronological. In Hamnet, she toggles between two timelines, one beginning on the day the plague first afflicts Hamnet's twin sister Judith, the other circling back to the beginning of their parents' passionate relationship some 15 years earlier.

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In this telling, the woman we know as Anne Hathaway is called Agnes, pronounced Ann-yis, which O'Farrell explains is how her name appeared in her father's will. She's a wonderful character, a free spirit and healer who, like her late mother, is most at home in the woods. But she's also a Cinderella in her nasty stepmother's household, in which the future playwright — still in his teens with an uncertain future — is indentured as a Latin tutor to help settle a debt incurred by his errant father.

The two abused misfits recognize something special in each other, and the chemistry between them is palpable. A first kiss, later followed by sex that literally rocks and upends the apples in the storage shed, would be heavy-handed in its biblical overtones were it not so beautifully written. Hamnet is, among other things, a love story about a sorely tested marriage.

But before we meet his parents, we meet Hamnet, a smart but easily distractible boy, as he desperately seeks help for his twin sister, who has suddenly taken ill. With rising panic, he checks upstairs and down in his family's small apartment and his grandparents' adjacent house, and is anguished to discover that his mother, grandmother, aunt, and older sister are nowhere to be found. His father is off in London staging his plays. The only one home, drinking ale in the off-bounds parlour, is his irascible grandfather, from whom Hamnet has been warned to keep his distance.

As in her earlier novels, O'Farrell seeds her tale with dark forebodings. Agnes, off tending her bees during Hamnet's frantic search, will come to rue her absence that day:

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry ... It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages — from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell. But with this historical novel she has expanded her repertoire, enriching her narrative with atmospheric details of the sights, smells, and relentless daily toil involved in running a household in Elizabethan England — a domestic arena in which a few missing menstrual rags on washday is enough to alarm a mother of girls.

About halfway through this tour de force, there's a remarkable 10-page passage in which O'Farrell traces how the plague reached Agnes' children. It's a sequence that would stand out even in more salubrious times, but which holds particular resonance in light of the current global Covid-19 pandemic.

"For the pestilence to reach Warwicksire, England, in the summer of 1596," O'Farrell writes, "two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet." The unwitting conduits are a master glassmaker in Murano, who in a moment of inattention burns his hands while blowing glass beads, and a cabin boy on a merchant ship, who becomes enchanted with an African monkey in Alexandria and picks up a stowaway infected flea in his red neckerchief. With the tenaciousness of a forensic viral chaser, O'Farrell charts the flea and its progeny's deadly path, through cats, rats, midshipmen, officers, glassmaker, and into the boxes of glass beads, one of which Hamnet's sister Judith excitedly unpacks when it is delivered to a Stratford seamstress who has been eagerly awaiting them for a client's fancy gown.

Unaware of the source of her children's illness, poor Agnes is left to suffer the consequences. O'Farrell writes, "There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet's death." But of course she realizes, "There will be no going back. No undoing what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way."

Although more than 400 years have unspooled since Hamnet Shakespeare's death, the story O'Farrell weaves in this moving novel is timeless and ever-relevant.

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By Maggie O'Farrell

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, a story about Shakespeare's marriage and the death of his son.

Hamnet opens with some historical notes. A couple in Stratford had three children, twins Hamnet and Judith, and daughter Susanna. Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven. Roughly four years later, his father writes the play Hamlet (a name that is interchangeable at the time with name Hamnet).

As the story unfolds, the book tells a fictionalized story of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes and the death of their son Hamnet.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The three-sentence summary: Hamnet is essentially a family-type drama telling the background between Will Shakespeare and his wife Agnes. It follows their relationship as they deal with their grief over the death of their son Hamnet, the implications of Will's career and Will's infidelity. In the end, Will writes the play Hamlet as a farewell to his son -- it's a play where the father dies instead of the son and the ghost's final line is "Remember me."

(The book opens with a few historical notes . A couple in Stratford had three children, twins Hamnet and Judith, and daughter Susanna. Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven. Roughly four years later, his father writes the play Hamlet , interchangeable at the time with name Hamnet.)

The chapters jump back and forth between two timelines. In 1596, Hamnet is a young boy whose twin sister Judith has suddenly fallen ill. Hamnet searches for an adult, but the only person home is his drunk and abusive grandfather John Shakespeare. John is a disgraced glove maker, due to his illicit wool trading, among other things. Hamnet's father (William Shakespeare, though he is never named in the book) is in London, as usual. Hamnet's mother, Agnes, is away. He falls asleep next to Judith, crying.

In an earlier timeline, John Shakespeare owes a debt to a (deceased) sheep farmer. John and the farmer's (second) wife Joan have an arrangement for his son William to work off the debt by tutoring Joan's sons. It results in the tutor (Will Shakespeare) meeting Agnes. Agnes and her brother Bartholomew are the farmer's children with his first wife. Agnes has special abilities, where she is able to divine information about people, and she is also good with plants. Agnes and William fall in love.

In 1596, Agnes finally comes home and tries to treat Judith, confirming that she has "the pestilence" (the plague). The doctor shows up and warns them that no one is to leave the house until it has passed. When nothing works, Eliza (William's sister) writes to her brother in London to tell him to come home to say goodbye.

In an earlier timeline, Agnes becomes pregnant. John senses a business opportunity and strikes a bargain with Joan and Bartholomew regarding the debt, wool and Agnes. Soon, Agnes and the tutor are married. The baby, Susanna, is born. Agnes notices that her husband is unhappy as an errand-boy for his father. Agnes comes up with a plan to get John to send William to London. The plan works. Though Agnes is pregnant again, but William leaves for London, with plans to reunite once he is settled there.

An interlude traces the path of the disease. It involves a chance meeting of a glassmaker in Venice and a cabin boy on a ship. The cabin boy brings a disease-ridden flea onto the ship after interacting with a monkey in Alexandria. The pestilence ravages the ship. After the glassmaker loads his cargo in Venice, fleas end up in those boxes, which is unloaded in London. One box makes its way to a dressmaker. Her neighbor's daughter, Judith, is curious about it. The dressmaker lets Judith unpackage the disease-ridden box.

In 1596, Hamnet sees his dying sister and wants to trick death into taking him instead. He crawls into bed next to her. Agnes is soon surprised to discover that Judith is looking better, but Hamnet is barely breathing. She tries every remedy, but he dies.

In the earlier timeline, William sells some gloves to actors at a theater. Soon, he is acting (and later writing plays) and no longer dealing in gloves. In Stratford, Agnes is surprised to have twins, though she is worried because she has always known she would have only two children. Judith is the second one out, and she is weak and smaller than Hamnet. Agnes delays going to London until Judith is stronger, but Judith continues to be weak and sickly. The years pass, but the move to London never happens.

In 1596, William comes home to find Hamnet, not Judith, dead. Hamnet is buried. William is heartbroken. The house is full of reminders of Hamnet, and he is worried about the life he has built in London. William soon goes back to London and does not come home for a long time. Judith wonders if her resemblance to Hamnet is what keeps him away. Agnes grieves, too.

A year after Hamnet's death, William finally comes home. Agnes senses that he has been with other women. William apologizes for everything and decides to buy his family a house here in Stratford since it is clear that they will not be coming to London. He buys the largest house in the town, though he still only visits two or three times a year. As the girls grow up, Judith develops a love of plants like her mother. Susanna helps out with her father's affairs in terms of purchasing land, rental income, and other business affairs.

One day, Agnes learns that William has written a play (Hamlet) named after their son. Upset, Agnes goes (with Bartholomew) to London to find William. She finds him at the playhouse before a performance of Hamlet. As she watches the play, she realizes that her husband has written a play where the father is the one that dies instead of the child. In his play, "Hamlet"/Hamnet gets to live. The book ends with the last line that the ghost delivers, "Remember me".

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

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Book Review

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (or, Hamnet and Judith in some markets) is one of books in recent memory that I’ve been genuinely really excited to read.

After reading Bill Bryson’s wonderful (non-fiction) biography of Shakespeare , I’ve been interested in reading more historical fiction about the famous Bard, but haven’t found much to catch my eye. I tried a couple that I disliked enough that I gave on the pursuit for a while, but Hamnet has gotten great reviews and it sounded like a unique take on Shakespeare.

Hamnet is largely told with a focus on Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare. (Anne Hathaway is the name that’s commonly used, but Agnes and Anne were commonly interchangeable at that time.) The death of Hamnet, their only male child, due to the plague features prominently in the story as well.

O’Farrell never actually refers to William Shakespeare by name, which helps to detach the story from all the mythology that comes with Shakespeare and his reputation. It also helps to reinforce that, although he is still a main character here, he’s not the main character.

O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a work of historical fiction, with a lot of emphasis on the word fiction . The reality is that what’s really known about Shakespeare is spotty at best (if you want to know more, I’ll reference Bryson’s Shakespeare biography here again), but it still makes for a delightful story to wonder about his life. (I also suspect that this story wouldn’t stand up to careful scrutiny about Shakespeare and all the details of his life, see the Historical Accuracy section below, but I’m not enough of a Shakespearean scholar to say for sure.)

Instead, facts serve as the rough contours of this book that gets filled in colorfully and vividly by this moving and beautifully written story. It’s not a complex or even terribly clever rendition of Agnes and William’s story, but O’Farrell tells it in a way that’s powerful and alive.

Quick (Minor) Criticism

The character of William Shakespeare in this book is humanized and made smaller. I understand why O’Farrell might want to do that, to avoid writing yet another tribute to the greatness of the towering figure of the William Shakespeare. However, I have to admit that this aspect of the book wasn’t entirely satisfying to me. Unlike his portrayal in the book, ultimately, he wasn’t just a guy who became financially comfortable writing plays. Instead, he wrote masterpieces and a lot of them.

Apart from a very brief section where he plays a quick word game with his sister Eliza, there’s nothing in the book indicating that this is or was a brilliant person. Instead, he’s depicted as a disappointment to his parents, an absent father, a weakling and kind of an unmotivated loser in general, all of which made it hard for me to view this as a story that was about Shakespeare at all. I understand this wasn’t intended to be an origin story about William Shakespeare, but I also can’t imagine that this useless lump of a man described here would become the mythological creature that he is.

As a final note, even with that criticism, Hamnet not even being longlisted for the Booker Prize still says a lot more about a deficiencies of the Booker Prize’s judges panel (in my opinion) than it does about Maggie O’Farrell’s newest novel, which is well worth a read.

Historical Accuracy

As mentioned previously, there’s definitely a lot of fiction mixed up in here.

For example, a colorful interlude in the book involves a petrified Hamnet and a doctor wearing the distinctively creepy beaked plague mask that you’ve probably seen before. The problem is, in the book this happens in 1596, and the design is commonly attributed to Charles de Lorme , chief physician to Louis XIII, who was born in 1584. It seems unlikely he designed it when he was 12. Furthermore, historians have noted that there’s no evidence the Plague Doctor costume was ever used in London . (It was primarily used in 17th/18th century Italy and France.)

I’m not a historian — not even a history buff, really — so if I can catch this fairly obvious mistake, I’m certain there are others in here as well.

Did any of this spoil my enjoyment of the book? Not really, but again, history buffs and Shakespearean scholars may feel differently.

Read it or Skip it?

Hamnet is a moving and uncomplicated tale about a marriage, a family and the loss of a child. It focuses on the character of Agnes and offers unique rendition of Shakespeare’s life.

I enjoyed the story quite a bit, the writing is lovely, and there’s a lot to like about Maggie O’Farrell’s vivid and engaging version of Agnes and William’s story.

I found the portrayal of William Shakespeare here a bit unconvincing and I think there are likely some historical inaccuracies here, but it still works splendidly as a work of historical fiction due to O’Farrell’s storytelling abilities. It’s an intimate and emotional book that I think historical fiction lovers can appreciate.

See Hamnet on Amazon.

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Thanks for your thoughts. I will put this one on my TBR list.

Hi rosi! And thanks for reading, hope all is well with you!

Very emotional moments in the book. The love of a brother for his twin sister is amazing. The only other such example I know is when the firs Meghal emperor Babur was sitting near his son Hamayun’s death bed.He prayed to God to take his life and save his son and that did happen.

A Fictional Book About Shakespeare's Son Helped Me Grieve the Loss of Mine

How one writer overcame the grief of losing his son while reading Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet.

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Books have seen me through the pandemic. It’s almost a cliché among bibliophiles, but each week I run across this sentiment on Twitter and Facebook, in long-distance phone chats, over brie and bottles of chardonnay in nearby Prospect Park. And then there’s the novel that sees you, almost literally, in this unprecedented year, plots mirroring the trajectory of your life, reversals of fortune identical to your own. Characters who glide off the page and sit on the edge of the bed, soothing your anxiety with whispered confidences―they complete your sentences, complete you.

Imagine my surprise when an Elizabethan odyssey became a roadmap through a year like no other.

In January I lost my 18 year old son, Owen, to sepsis; the infection swept in like a wildfire, ravaging his body and snuffing him out in under forty-eight hours. The previous week Covid-19 cases had peaked in the U.S. while violent insurrectionists had flooded into the nation’s capital. Grief–my grief–felt like a footnote to a vast malevolence, a ripple in a hurricane. The best way to mourn, I vowed, was to go off grid. I hunkered down in my Brooklyn apartment, throwing myself into a skeleton list of tasks: indulging my wife and two other teenagers with Indian take-out, double-masking at the gym, grooming the cats, hauling out garbage and recycling bins. And I read books—not only for work, but also for nourishment I craved but couldn’t quite understand. The less my mind rested, I figured, the less restlessness would surge through me, like a virus.

Which led me to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet , published last year to universal acclaim and named one of 2020’s five best works of fiction by the New York Times Book Review. I was late to this stunning beauty, but in this case tardiness was a virtue: I picked up Hamnet at the moment I needed it most.

Knopf Hamnet

In precise, lavish detail, O’Farrell recreates the story of Shakespeare’s only son (also known as Hamlet), who succumbed to bubonic plague in 1596 at the age of eleven. She shifts between decades flawlessly, braiding the foreground narrative with the personal history of the enigmatic Agnes Hathaway, the Bard’s wife and mother of his three children. The abrupt subtraction of one. In O’Farrell’s telling the boy slips away fast. His father is summoned from the London stage and dashes back to the homestead in Stratford-upon-Avon but is too late. Agnes leans into her final maternal duty: she stitches Hamnet’s shroud, washes and dresses his body for burial.

“She begins at the face, at the top of him. He has a wide forehead . . . She dips the cloth, she washes, she dips again . . . The third finger of his right hand is calloused from gripping a quill. There are small pits in the skin of his stomach from when he had a spotted pox as a small child . . . Agnes looks at her son. The birdcage ribs, the interlaced fingers, the round bones of his knees, the still face, the corn-coloured hair, which has dried now, standing up from his brow, as it always does. His physical presence has always been so strong, so definite.”

I lacked Agnes’ resolve. After Owen passed away that bright cold January morning–measured in minutes, the stutter of alarms, ICU doctors yelling across a carousel of CPR–I came to his bedside. The tumult had ebbed away; there was a hush in the room. The physicians disconnected his ventilator and dimmed the monitors. His breathing tube stubbed out a few inches like a lopped umbilical cord, a smear of blood and gauze around the stoma. I touched his curls. He seemed himself, just asleep. Pink-cheeked, slack-jawed, lips a rosebud. Later his complexion would ashen, his tongue loll, slug-like, from his mouth.

Two nurses nudged me aside and asked whether they could clean him up before my wife arrived at the hospital. Fresh linens, a starched gown. I said yes, but that I wanted to wait out in the lobby, where for an hour I huddled over my cell, scrolling through contacts, veering from call to call. I must have spoken, in nervous fragments, to at least a dozen family members and friends, but I can’t say for sure. In Agnes O’Farrell captures that sense of light-headed disbelief, an instinct to connect what just happened with a larger story: there’s a global pandemic on and my son just died.

After Hamnet’s funeral, a torturous affair–Agnes is “hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial”—her husband once again heeds the siren call of the theater. He can only mourn by going on with the show; he’s already mulling a new piece, a ghost haunting a disaffected Danish prince. The Bard’s daughters act out: Susanna tantrums while Judith, Hamnet’s twin, weeps in silence. Agnes hobbles around in a daze, immersed in country life, tending gardens, keeping bees in a skep. Only in the novel’s last pages when, years later, Agnes journeys to the Globe Theater to watch a performance of Hamlet , can she reconcile her tragedy with an art that transcends and sustains. The play’s the thing, with many allusions to her son. “The knowledge settles on her like a fine covering of rain,” O’Farrell writes. “Her husband has pulled off a manner of alchemy.”

We seek that alchemy from our masters, Shakespeare to O’Farrell and beyond. We seek to be seen in our most private, stripped-down moments. Recently I was having drinks with an acquaintance, a writer, in a garden tucked behind a trattoria in Greenwich Village, when he asked how many children I had, boys, girls? I fumbled the tense— I have . . .uh . . . had three boys, but now only two —before segueing into a précis of my loss. He sat across a rickety table, eyes glistening with tears, but the moment wasn’t heavy, far from it—I’d learned a thing or two about subtraction from O’Farrell. Just now I’m holding the novel in my hand, flipping it open, and finding my reflection there.

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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Reading Ladies

Hamnet [book review] #literaryfiction.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is poignant Literary Fiction, the story of a mother’s grief, and the winner of the Women’s Fiction Prize for 2020.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Genre/Categories/Setting: Historical Literary Fiction, Family Life, Mothers and Children, Grief, Magical Realism, 1500s England

*This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

TW: Review mentions the death of a child.

My Summary of Hamnet:

Hamnet is set in 1580s Warwickshire, England and is the highly imagined story of William Shakespeare’s family and his wife, Agnes (Anne). This is a poignant and emotional story focused on marriage and family. Shakespeare and Agnes have three children, and we know from history that Hamnet dies. In this story of a mother’s grief, O’Farrell imagines that the 1550s plague is the cause of his death. You might be surprised that William Shakespeare is “off-stage” for the majority of the story and is never mentioned by name (referred to as husband, father, etc.). As a result, Agnes is centered as the main character of the story, and a mother’s grief is the main theme. A beautiful woman, Agnes exhibits some supernatural gifts of healing with herbs, is entirely devoted to family, and frequently experiences glimpses into the future.

My Thoughts About Hamnet:

Writing and Structure: The first thing that will strike you about Hamnet is the exquisite writing. I was convinced within a few chapters that Hamnet is truly Literary Fiction . (the focus of literary fiction is on the craft of writing, social observations, the meaning of life, and heavily character-driven with the action being internal). This passage is from the opening pages and sets the stage for the story and foreshadows the tension, grief, and regret to come:

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry. Him standing here, at the back of the house, calling for the people who had fed him, swaddled him, rocked him to sleep, held his hand as he took his first steps, taught him to use a spoon, to blow on broth before he ate it, to take care crossing the street, to let sleeping dogs lie, to swill out a cup before drinking, to stay away from deep water. It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.”

This passage is especially compelling as I felt the desperation of this boy as he calls for help for his sister who has fallen ill. At the same time, I can strongly image his mother’s regret at not being there.

O’Farrell uses the entire book to detail a brief number of days in which the plague descends on Shakespeare’s home with devastating results.  The filler is flashbacks of Agnes and William’s love story, early marriage, and family life. These flashbacks jump in a steam of consciousness way and readers can quickly lose their bearings if not focused. The flashbacks can take the reader to any time and place. It’s a challenging read in the sense of structure .

Character-Driven: Even though the story is heavily character-driven, it contains enough plot to move the story forward. I liked that William was kept in the background (mostly offstage) to better focus on the imagined story of Agnes and their family. O’Farrell draws a beautiful and fascinating portrait of an intriguing and mysterious Agnes from her early romance with William to the realities of being a wife and mother in the 1580s to her profound grief to her rebuilding. Agnes is a strong, likable, and inspiring character.

Setting: O’Farrell’s depiction of life in the 1580s to the 1590s is detailed and atmospheric and I was transported there! It’s not often that we’re taken that far back in historical fiction!

Themes: As mentioned above, grief is the driving theme and its description is breathtaking and heart wrenching. Other themes include brother/sister relationships, mother/daughter connection, a woman’s life in the 1500s, and forgiveness. The story includes magical realism, connecting with the dead, foreseeing the future, and striking a bargain in the dying process. This was not my favorite part (affected my rating) and I would have been happy with less of the paranormal, but this is personal taste. Readers who love the paranormal aspect will find it well done.

Strong Trigger Warnings/Content Consideration: Most of this heartfelt story is focused around the death of a child and resulting grief. Because of this I feel like it’s an emotionally heavy read for anyone .

Recommended!

Recommended: This mother’s story is definitely recommended for fans of Maggie O’Farrell, for readers of engaging historical fiction, for those who appreciate Literary Biographical Fiction and want to read the 2020 Women’s Fiction Prize winner, for readers who desire to know more about the woman behind a famous man, and for book clubs (with TWs). Because this is Agnes’s story, I feel like this could have been called Agnes , but the title probably wouldn’t have been as eye catching as Hamnet .

Hamnet has won the Women’s Fiction Prize for 2020.

Thanks Davida @ The Chocolate Lady’s Book Blog for bringing the book to my attention. You will enjoy her thoughtful review!

My Rating: 4.5 Stars (rounded up to 5)

More Information Here

Meet the Author of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

Have you read a book by Maggie O’Farrell?

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43 comments.

An excellent review. One of my favourite books this year. I love Maggie O’Farrell’s writing.

Thanks! It was an emotional read for me!

So… have I made you an O’Farrell fan, then?

Ha! I’m always willing to give her a try! This is an amazing piece of writing and I liked it better than This Must Be the Place despite it having paranormal elements. The historical setting and the mother losing a child theme gripped me. I think it depends on how much paranormal she includes….that’s really not my jam. But maybe it’s a Scottish thing??? I do like character driven when it has strong internal conflict and Daniel (I think?) certainly had that in This Must Be the Place. In both books she certainly uses a loose structure! I had to DNF her memoir I Am I Am….it made me feel anxious. So this is a complicated answer to your question!!

Well, this didn’t really have paranormal thing as much as more folklore rituals. Her book My Lover’s Lover almost feels like there’s paranormal but you have to read it all to get it!

Loved reading all your thoughts on this one. I have a feeling it will become one of my favourite books as it has so many themes that I am drawn to.

It’s an incredible and memorable read….I hope you enjoy it!

You’ve increased my desire to read this. Also, all the talk of this book makes me want to read This Must Be the Place again.

It’s an incredible and memorable read. I had to roll my eyes through the paranormal parts though. I hope you enjoy it!

Hamnet wasn’t on my TBR list, but it is now! Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Great! I hope it’s a good read for you!

[…] books were on my initial fall TBR list and then FOMO gripped me and I read them in early September! Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. I highly recommend both of these 5 Star reads for your fall […]

I enjoyed this very much, too. I think I would have raved about it a little more if we weren’t living in such dark times, if it weren’t so difficult to read sad stories now.

I immediately followed it up with 2 very light reads so I could shake the heaviness!

I’ve read so much about this book, I’m waiting for Christmas time to read it! Great post! x

Thanks! It’s a memorable read! Enjoy! 🙌

The first thing I thought as I saw the title was Hamlet. I wasn’t far off, huh? 😀 Fantastic review, Carol. I love how much depth this one has and how it explores various relationships so beautifully too. It’s been a while since I picked up literary fiction, but they are often hit or miss with me. Sometimes the author really does too much, making it harder to appreciate the premise by the end. This one, however, sound brilliant! Thanks for sharing! 😀

You’re welcome! I’m hit or miss with lit fiction, too. This grabbed my heart and emotions. 😍

[…] 4.5-5 Stars. Compelling, engaging, and emotional literary fiction. My review of Hamnet here. […]

What a wonderful review of Hamnet Carol. I have the audiobook of this one on hold, but I think I will read it instead, I want to relish the language and I can’t always do that when I listen to a book. I also added this one after reading Davida’s review.

Thanks Carla! I hope you enjoy it! Hamnet is one memorable and unforgettable (albeit emotional) read.

[…] favorites list! I love Book Hangovers! Books this year that have given me a book hangover include Hamnet, The Girl With the Louding Voice, and Transcendent Kingdom. I haven’t yet finished The Choice […]

[…] month (January 2, 2021), we’ll start with the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Join […]

[…] Hamnet by Maggie O-Farrel (histfic, Shakespheare). My review of Hamnet here. […]

Thank you for this detailed review. I was gobsmacked that Hamnet didn’t make it to the Booker prize.

So beautifully written! 😍

[…] Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell […]

[…] month’s prompt starts with Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and I’m thrilled because it was a favorite, top read for me in […]

Reading this at the moment, WordPress highlighted your post at the end of my latest which mentioned it. A good review!

Thank you so much for visiting and commenting! I hope that Hamnet is a memorable read for you! It gave me a book hangover!

[…] I have learned through experience to approach highly buzzed and popular books with caution because high expectations have definitely affected my reading experience. Do you find this true in your reading life? Two recent books that did meet my high expectations were the audio version of Project Hail Mary (The audio was absolutely as good as I expected) and Hamnet. […]

[…] Genre: literary fiction, historical literary fiction Maggie O’Farrell is a popular writer so her new releases receive a great deal of hype. Because this is historical fiction, I hopped aboard the hype train. My review of Hamnet here. […]

[…] The time and place when Shakespeare and his family lived are vividly described in Hamnet. […]

[…] reading the emotional Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, I purposefully read a few lighthearted […]

[…] Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrellpaired withShakespeare: The Biography […]

[…] Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is my compelling and poignant literary fiction selection for #throwbackthursday. […]

[…] Things or Rose Code for example). I prefer not to read overwhelmingly sad or emotional books. Hamnet is the exception. I’m annoyed by some authors who try to manipulate me to “ugly […]

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Book review: Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell


If you are feeling a twinge of concern about a novelist releasing a Tudor historical novel at the same time as Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & The Light, be not afraid. This is a remarkable piece of work, in which emotional intelligence and solid, intellectual research are evident, but with enough of a “space for fiction” to make it a novel and not a thesis.


How do you write a novel about Shakespeare? Others have tried – the only one which seems to me a success is Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like The Sun which, in a rather extravagant performance, only uses words used by Shakespeare (with one exception). I would suppose that the cardinal rule is: you can’t get into the mind of Shakespeare. A subsidiary recommendation is not to try to write in cod-Shakespearean, full of prithees and privies and fol-de-rols and hey, nonny, nos. Mostly because that’s not really like Shakespeare. O’Farrell excels in avoiding both the traps, and, perhaps most impressively of all, has fashioned a novel of true heart and character that can be read and appreciated even if you have no interest in Shakespeare at all.

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Part of the ingenuity is that Shakespeare is, if not absent, very much in the background. The two lensing characters are Agnes and Hamnet. Agnes is Anne Hathaway: Elizabethan orthography was rather more fluid than we have today, and it is also a subtle way to assert the fictive nature of the book. She has something in common with the depiction in Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, being assertive, clever and nobody’s fool. But O’Farrell adds in a layer of almost mysticism. To deploy and yet not succumb to the “witches were just clever herbalists oppressed by the patriarchy” is a cunning move. Hamnet is a clever and sensitive and imaginative boy; perhaps too clever and too sensitive and too imaginative. The Bard appears most frequently not as the Bard at all. He is “a Latin tutor”, “my son”, “that wageless, useless, beardless”, “my husband”, “the father”.


Even though there is no attempt to imitate Shakespeare, the novel does have a very distinctive set of Shakespearean registers. Shakespeare has an odd number of negative words, from privative suffixes, as seen above, to the use of “no” words (as in King Lear’s “no, no, no life!... Never, never, never, never, never!”) He also had a penchant for words beginning “un”, and this is replicated in O’Farrell. We get unfinished, unrisen, ungainly, unasked, unruffled, unmoving and many, many others. It gives a Shakespearean tang. More so, in scenes where Shakespeare is in dialogue with other characters, his most frequent response is “nothing”. Although this is an astute reading of the texture of Shakespeare’s style, it also serves the purpose of keeping him a blank. Nothing will come of nothing, speak again. There are other touches, such as Agnes’s bridal crown or herb garden which give the granular detail of flora that is reminiscent of the plays (such as Ophelia’s famous speech); or the details about Shakespeare’s father’s glove-making business. But it is not cluttered detail for its own sake.   


In the 20th century, academic controversy raged about the possible connections between the death of Hamnet and the tragedy of Hamlet – or even the links it might have to the lost son Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale or to the (slyly referenced) female twin who thinks her brother is dead in Twelfth Night. But the novel’s success is nothing whatsoever to do with where one thinks the balance of probabilities lies. Rather it is about grief, about the loss of a child, about the transformational capacity of art, about childbirth, about ambition, about absent fathers. These are all themes O’Farrell has explored before in novels like The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox, or The Hand That First Held Mine, and, as with her other novels (and her memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am) the same shuttlecocking of chronology generates tension even when the outcome seems predestined. 


This is a staggeringly beautiful and unbearably poignant novel. O’Farrell is one of the most surprisingly quiet radicals in fiction. When I finished it, I wondered – no, I hoped – that instead of shifting genre again, O’Farrell might not follow Mantel with a sequel. After all, the final years of Shakespeare between leaving the stage and dying are another curious absence.


In one scene Hamnet returns to “the narrow house, built in a gap, a vacancy”, making it much like the superior kind of historical novel. No-one is at home. “He pauses waiting for an answer but there is nothing: only silence”. “The rest is silence”, as Hamlet says. But there is still the rapturous applause of the audience. 


 Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, £20


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Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell review – tragic tale of the Latin tutor’s son

I n 1596, William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son Hamnet died in Stratford-upon-Avon. Four or so years later, Shakespeare wrote the play considered by many to be his greatest work, giving its tragic hero a variation of his dead son’s name. Almost four centuries later still, Maggie O’Farrell was studying Hamlet at school and learned of the boy Hamnet, whose life has been little more than a footnote in his father’s biography. The seed of curiosity planted 30 years ago has grown into her finest novel yet; a reimagining of Hamnet’s death and the long-lasting ripples it sent through his family.

But the title is slightly misleading. Though the novel opens with Hamnet, its central character and beating heart is the boy’s mother, whom O’Farrell calls Agnes. Names are significant in this book; when Agnes eventually sees the version of her son’s name on a London playbill, she feels he has been stolen from her a second time. Meanwhile, the most famous character in the novel goes unnamed; he is variously “her husband”, “the father”, “the Latin tutor”. He is allowed very little direct speech. This deliberate omission frees the narrative of all the freight of association that his name carries; even Stratford is rarely mentioned explicitly, with the author instead naming individual streets and houses to root her story in its location.

All this has the effect of focusing the attention on the everyday, domestic life of this family, who could be any family. Indeed, in their small local sphere it is Agnes who is the celebrity, known in the town for being unconventional, free-spirited, a gifted herbalist who trails rumours of other, stranger gifts. O’Farrell’s Agnes is a woman whose origins merge into a particularly English kind of folklore – “There used to be a story in these parts about a girl who lived at the edge of a forest” – harking back to a deep connection between humans and landscape, with echoes of tales such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight .

“There were creatures in there who resembled humans – wood-dwellers, they were called – who walked and talked, but had never set foot outside the forest, had lived all their lives in its leafish light, its encircling branches, its wet and tangled interior.”

Agnes herself is, in the eyes of her neighbours, a creature descended from myth; they regard her with a mixture of awe and wariness. When the young Latin tutor engaged to teach her half-brothers first spies her from the window of the schoolroom, striding out of the forest with a kestrel on her wrist, he thinks she is a boy. O’Farrell’s great skill throughout the book is to treat obviously “Shakespearean” themes, such as this kind of gender-blurring or the affinity between boy and girl twins, with subtlety, making them almost tangential when they occur in the playwright’s own life. Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith, have a trick they play on people: “to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other”.

This is not O’Farrell’s first foray into historical fiction – her 2006 novel The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox was set partly in the 1930s – but it is quite unlike anything she has written before. There is an elliptical, dreamlike quality to her prose in Hamnet that, though not obviously steeped in 16th-century language, is essential to creating a world that feels at once wholly tangible and somehow otherworldly, as if the membrane between the natural and supernatural was more porous then. The depth of her research is evident on every page. Anyone who has visited Shakespeare’s birthplace will recognise her descriptions of his former home, but O’Farrell plunges the reader into the vivid life of the house, with its smells of a glover’s workshop, the heat and bustle of a cookhouse, the physical effort of planting a garden or twisting out newly washed sheets.

At its heart, though, this is a book about grief, and the means by which people find their way through it. The scene in which Agnes washes and lays out the body of her dead son is devastating (he must be buried quickly, for fear the plague will spread – an aspect of the story that has gained accidental pertinence). There is great tenderness, too, in her reimagining of the relationship between Agnes and her husband, which endured such long absences. “It’s as if her mother needs London, and all that he does there, to rub off him before she can accept him back,” Judith observes.

Hamnet is evidence that there are always new stories to tell, even about the most well-known historical figures. It also confirms O’Farrell as an extraordinarily versatile writer, with a profound understanding of the most elemental human bonds – qualities also possessed by a certain former Latin tutor from Stratford.

• The Observer
• Maggie O'Farrell
• William Shakespeare

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• By Maggie O’Farrell
• Reviewed by Robert Allen Papinchak
• August 22, 2021

A masterful reimagining of the life — and death — of the Bard’s only son.

If Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize in fiction) were simply a captivating love story about a “falconer girl” and a “Latin tutor,” it would be compelling enough to hold a reader’s attention. However, when the tutor turns out to be William Shakespeare and the girl his wife (here known not as Anne, but Agnes), it becomes a brilliant historical novel steeped in the heady atmosphere of the 16th century.

With the little that is known about the playwright’s personal life and the even less that is known about his only son, O’Farrell has taken what she calls “idle speculation” and “scant historical facts” and transformed them into a spectacular narrative. She reconstructs the life and times of the Bard of Avon, his wife, and his children. And she makes the story her own.

Hamnet opens with a boy “coming down a flight of stairs…He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud.” As he reaches the bottom, he pauses a moment, “looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs…He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor.”

He is greeted by an unexpected, unusual silence. It is a profound quiet that dominates his short life and provides the emotional center to the entire exceptional novel. With a foregone sense of foreboding, it is not a spoiler to reveal that this 11-year-old boy never becomes a man.

But this is not just a book about Hamnet’s death. It is also a startling revelation about the crippling effects of grief and the arcane sources of creativity. It is about the mystery and magnificence of the family bond. Not just any family — the family Shakespeare.

In the disconcerting stillness, Hamnet is searching for someone, anyone to help him with his “unwell” twin sister, Judith. No one seems to be around. Not his grandparents next door; not his older sister, Susanna; and, most importantly, not his mother. His famous father is “miles and hours and days away, in London, where the boy has never been.” There is only the “indefinable noise of a house at rest, empty.” He is disconsolate, “utterly confounded to be so alone.” He lurches about, wondering, “where is everyone?”

Eventually, after rambling through the village, he stops at the physician’s house, where he discloses that Judith has a fever, along with “buboes [and] lumps. Under the skin. On her neck, under her arms.” He returns home, unwilling to name her illness: “He will not name it, he will not allow the word to form, even inside his head.”

It is, of course, the plague, one that has shuttered all the playhouses in London “by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public.” The great misfortune may be the family’s good fortune. It means his father may be able to return home for months.

O’Farrell gives vivid dimension to the story by flashing back to the time William and Agnes met. Eighteen-year-old Will is paying down his father’s debt to a yeoman who owns acreage in Hewlands by teaching Latin grammar to the farmer’s sons. Even there, his creative mind wanders. From a window, he watches trees:

“lined up as they are, fringing the edge of the farm, bring[ing] to his mind the backdrop of a theatre, the kind of painted trickery that is unrolled, quickly, into place to let the audience know they are now in a sylvan setting…on wooded, uncultivated, perhaps unstable ground.”

He also notices what he at first thinks is a young man “wearing a cap, a leather jerkin, gauntlets…[with] some kind of bird on his outstretched fist.” He is instantly drawn to the falconer, but then discovers it is the farmer’s eldest daughter. Thinking of her, of “her braid, her hawk,” lightens his “indentured” visits. She, too, is immediately taken with him.

What he doesn’t know is that she has a reputation for being “strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad.” She is known to carry a bag of “curses and cures.” In fact, she has psychic powers, “fascinated by the hands of others.” She finds the “muscle between thumb and forefinger…irresistible.”

When she takes hold of Will’s skin, an “oddly intimate” gesture, she senses greatness. He has a future that is “far-reaching [with] layers and strata, like a landscape…too big, too complex…more than she could grasp…bigger than both of them.” He is enamored of her because he thinks she “see[s] the world as no one else does.” Her paranormal skills match his imagination.

There are several memorable set pieces in the novel. The first, in 1583, is the couple’s initial lovemaking, a breathtaking scene set in an apple-storage area of the farm. Visually and aurally stimulating, it is vigorous enough to make a “tapping, rhythmic, rocking sound,” enough to “rotate and jostle [apples] in their grooves.”

The result is their firstborn, Susanna, who arrives in a captivating labor sequence in a forest where the “branches are so dense you cannot feel the rain.” It is there Agnes foresees that Will and she will have “two children and they will live long lives.” When she later bears twins, she is unsettled by what the earlier premonition must mean.

What no one knows is that, in 1596, there is a pestilence making its way from Alexandria, Egypt, via fleas, a monkey, cats, rats, and a cabin boy to infected rags wrapped around a glass necklace from Murano, Italy. The trail of disease ends in England when young Judith receives the millefiori beads. The heart-stopping description of the journey is one of O’Farrell’s most astounding narrative sequences.

Another remarkable one is the death of Hamnet at the end of the first part of the novel. Judith has been spared, but in an alarming, disconcerting way. A “great soundlessness” descends into the room where Hamnet lies. The hush that opened the book returns. There is only “silence, stillness. Nothing more.”

But O’Farrell is not quite finished with the boy, his mother, his father, or history (living and literary). The boy may be gone, but he is not forgotten. His memory lives on in the play that becomes Hamlet .

As the epigraph to the second part of the novel, O’Farrell quotes the prince’s dying words to Horatio: “I am dead:/Thou livest…draw thy breath in pain,/To tell my story.” She then explores the possibility that Agnes made her way to London and saw her husband appear at the Globe as Hamlet’s father’s ghost.

This closing sequence is the ultimate, gut-wrenching scene. Agnes realizes the emotional toll their child’s death has taken on Shakespeare. It has been four years. She has “looked for [him] everywhere, ceaselessly…and here he is.”

“[Her] Hamnet is dead…yet [this Hamlet] is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.” Her husband has “pulled off a manner of alchemy.”

Ghosts of all kinds prevail. They populate the stage; they embrace everyone’s thoughts. The Hamlet on the boards is “two people…both alive and dead.” A “final silence” descends at the end of the play, after “the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage.”

What O’Farrell has done is incredible. She has memorialized a family. The novel is the thing in which she catches the conscience of the reader. This is the kind of dazzling novel to put in everyone’s hands, to tell everyone to read. It is a flawless achievement. Every sentence is silk; every detail vibrant; every character pulsates.

In the overwhelming, heartbreaking conclusion of Hamnet , the author collects all the silences, all the sufferings, all the ghosts into a compelling resolution to tell the Shakespearean story. She breathes life into the boy who fell down the stairs.

[Editor's note: This review originally ran in 2020.]

Robert Allen Papinchak is a former university English professor whose reviews and criticisms appear in newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and online, including Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, On the Seawall, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.

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Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2020

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Winner

by Maggie O'Farrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2020

A gripping drama of the conflict between love and destiny.

Imagining the life of the family Shakespeare left behind in Stratford makes an intriguing change of pace for a veteran storyteller.

While O’Farrell eschews the sort of buried-secrets plots that drive the propulsive narratives of such previous novels as Instructions for a Heatwave (2013), her gifts for full-bodied characterization and sensitive rendering of intricate family bonds are on full display. She opens with 11-year-old Hamnet anxiously hovering over his twin sister, Judith, who has a mysterious fever and ominous swellings. When Hamnet asks his grandfather where his mother is, the old man strikes him, and as the novel moves through the characters’ memories, we see the role John Shakespeare’s brutality played in son Will’s departure for London. The central figure in this drama is Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, better known to history as Anne, recipient of the infamous second-best-bed bequest in his will. O’Farrell chooses an alternate name—spelling was not uniform in Elizabethan times—and depicts Agnes as a woman whose profound engagement with the natural world drew young Will to her from their first meeting. The daughter of a reputed sorceress, Agnes has a mysterious gift: She can read people’s natures and foresee their futures with a single touch. She sees the abilities within Will that are being smothered as a reluctant Latin tutor and inept participant in his father’s glove trade, and it is Agnes who deftly maneuvers John into sending him away. She believes she will join Will soon, but Judith’s frailty forestalls this. O’Farrell draws us into Agnes’ mixed emotions as the years go by and she sees Will on his increasingly infrequent visits “inhabiting it—that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do.” Hamnet’s death—bitterly ironic, as he was always the stronger twin—drives the couple farther apart, and news of a new play called Hamlet sends Agnes to London in a rage. O’Farrell’s complex, moving finale shows her watching the performance and honoring her husband’s ability to turn their grief into art.

Pub Date: July 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-65760-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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BOOK REVIEW

by Maggie O'Farrell

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”

A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.

Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!

Pub Date: June 11, 2024

ISBN: 9780316258876

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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Maggie O’Farrell on ‘Hamnet’

O’farrell discusses her novel about shakespeare and his family, and judith shulevitz talks about rachel cusk’s “second place.”.

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Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” one of last year’s most widely acclaimed novels, imagines the life of William Shakespeare, his wife, Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, and the couple’s son Hamnet, who died at 11 years old in 1596. On this week’s podcast, O’Farrell says she always planned for the novel to have the ensemble cast it does, but that her deepest motivation was the desire to capture a sense of the young boy at its center.

“The engine behind the book for me was always the fact that I think Hamnet has been overlooked and underwritten by history,” she says. “I think he’s been consigned to a literary footnote. And I believe, quite strongly, that without him — without his tragically short life — we wouldn’t have the play ‘Hamlet.’ We probably wouldn’t have ‘Twelfth Night.’ As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”

Judith Shulevitz visits the podcast to discuss Rachel Cusk’s new novel, “Second Place,” and to analyze Cusk’s literary style.

“In this review, I quote Isaac Babel: ‘No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.’ There’s this kind of clinical accuracy to her writing,” Shulevitz says, “that she brings to bear on both the physical world and on the emotional world that is almost scary. Which is what I like.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary this year; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world ; and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“The Life She Wished to Live” by Ann McCutchan

“Dedicated” by Pete Davis

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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Reviews of Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

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• Jul 21, 2020

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About This Book

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Book Summary

"Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare's life … here is a novel … so gorgeously written that it transports you." — The Boston Globe

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young, alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

Excerpt Hamnet

A boy is coming down a flight of stairs. The passage is narrow and twists back on itself. He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud. Near the bottom, he pauses for a moment, looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs, as is his habit. He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor. It is a close, windless day in late summer, and the downstairs room is slashed by long strips of light. The sun glowers at him from outside, the windows latticed slabs of yellow, set into the plaster. He gets up, rubbing his legs. He looks one way, up the stairs; he looks the other, unable to decide which way he should turn. The room is empty, the fire ruminating in its grate, orange embers below soft, spiralling smoke. His injured kneecaps throb in time with his heartbeat. He stands with one hand resting on the latch of the door to the stairs, the scuffed leather tip of ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• What did you know about the origins of Hamlet , and about the history of William Shakespeare's life and family, before reading this novel? How did the novel change your interpretation of the play?
• How do Agnes's special gifts affect her reputation throughout the town and her connection to her husband? Consider especially the way she feels the space between a person's index finger and thumb, where "a person's ability, their reach, their essence can be gleaned," and how she uses this part of the body to connect with different people in the novel (49).
• Describe the nature of Agnes's love for her husband, and his for her. What draws them to each other, despite their different backgrounds?
• What makes Susanna's birth different from that ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide may contain spoilers!

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National Book Critics Circle Awards 2020

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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

The first two-thirds of the novel are split into a dual timeline, bouncing back and forth between the week of Hamnet's death (the present), and the blossoming romance between William and Agnes (the past). It's a tender yet fraught courtship, and the pacing here is slow and deliberate. The final third speeds up and takes place after the death of their son. Both parts are equally as successful — the languid pace is sustained by O'Farrell's lyrical prose, and the more frantic pace is made tense and urgent by it. O'Farrell imagines the subtler influences of Agnes and Hamnet on Shakespeare in a novel that's as intimate and human as it is grandiose... continued

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(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett ).

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Beyond the Book

Anne hathaway and hamnet shakespeare.

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#BookReview Hamnet & Judith by Maggie O’Farrell @KnopfCA @PenguinRandomCA #HamnetandJudith

TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A PLAGUE THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.

England, 1580. A young Latin tutor–penniless, bullied by a violent father–falls in love with an eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family’s estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles on the Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband. His gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when their beloved twins, Hamnet and Judith, are afflicted with the bubonic plague, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet & Judith is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers.

Rich, immersive, and evocative!

Hamnet & Judith is a vivid, compelling, powerful interpretation that sweeps you away to Stratford-upon-Avon in the late 1500s and into the life of the Shakespeare family, from the courtship and marriage of William and Agnes to the devastating loss of their young son Hamlet at the tender age of eleven.

The prose is eloquent and emotive. The characters are well-drawn, endearing, and authentic. And the plot is an absorbing tale of life, loss, love, grief, family, aspirations, heartache, and motherhood.

Overall, Hamnet & Judith  is a pensive, alluring, beautifully written story by O’Farrell that does a remarkable job of highlighting her incredible knowledge and research into these renowned historical figures whose personal lives are often unknown, forgotten, or overshadowed by the patriarch’s incredibly profound contribution to the world of drama and literature.

This novel is available now.

Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.

Thank you to Knopf Canada for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

About Maggie O'Farrell

Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, MAGGIE O'FARRELL grew up in Wales and Scotland and now lives in London. She has worked as a waitress, chambermaid, bike messenger, teacher, arts administrator, journalist (in Hong Kong and London), and as the deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday. She is the author of After You'd Gone (winner of the Betty Trask Award); My Lover's Lover; The Distance Between Us (recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award); The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox; The Hand That First Held Mine; Instructions for a Heatwave (winner of a Costa Book Award); This Must Be the Place; and most recently, I Am, I Am, I Am.

Photograph by Murdo Macleod.

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