NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “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 GlobeIn 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New … “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
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.
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.
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Wow. I didn’t think I’d want to read a book about Shakespeare’s son who died of the plague at age 11, especially in the middle of a pandemic. But the reviews were so good that I had to try it, and I am so glad I did. Forget the 16th century. Forget the bubonic plague. This is a story of love at first sight, of a marriage in the middle of family dynamics, of a family wrecked by tragedy and more. It’s a story of how grief can grip you and never let you go, but so can love. Some things like love and marriage and death and men and women just and children and inlaws never ever change, no matter the century. Excellent read, highly recommended by moi.
A bold, beautiful, heart-breaking novel. Maggie has taken on both the most famous writer in the world and the mantle of history with effortless grace. In the process she’s written the book of her life. I’m wildly jealous!
This is an unusual book, and it took me a while to get into it. But I’m glad I read it. The book transported me back to the 1500s in the UK and breathed life into one of the most mysterious of literary figures: William Shakespeare. Yet the main character is his wife, Anne/Agnes. What’s so good in the book is the depiction of these intense and interesting characters, especially Agnes. Although the bubonic plague supplies the tension, Hamnet is at its core more a story of a marriage than of a pandemic. The scenes depicting the family’s grief over the death of a child are poignant. PS: I loved the sequence about the flea.
This book is incredibly, achingly beautiful. I am simply astonished by Maggie O’Farrell’s writing. This is more than a portrait of the famous playwright, as I first expected, and more than a story of a plague and its impact – it is the laid-bare heart of a woman and mother, an extraordinary exploration of loss and love and the bone-deep ties of siblings. It will be one of those unforgettable stories I recommend to everyone.
What could be more common, over centuries and continents, than the death of a child — and yet Maggie O’Farrell, with her flawless sentences and furious heart, somehow makes it new. This story of remarkable people bereft of their boy will leave you shaking with loss but also the love from which family is spun.
I’m absolutely blown away by Maggie O’Farrell’s HAMNET. Love, grief, hope, resilience — the world of this novel is so vivid I could nearly smell the grass in the fields, hear the rain in the gutters. In moments where the story shoots up to heaven I was there, too, grieving with these characters, feeling how lucky we all are to be alive, understanding how desperately we want the people we love to be remembered. It’s without a doubt one of the best novels I’ve ever read.
This is the brilliantly imagined story about Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son who inspires the writing of the play Hamlet. But it’s more than that. It’s a story more particularly about Hamlet’s mother, Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, the wife of Shakespeare.
The first half of the novel sets the scene. Judith, Hamnet’s twin sister suddenly falls ill and her bewilderment is described in detail.
“She cannot comprehend what has happened to this day. One moment, she and Hamnet were pulling bits of thread for the cat’s new kittens … and then she had suddenly felt a weakness in her arms, an ache in her back, a prickling in her throat. … Now she is on this bed and she has no idea how she got here.”
Hamnet desperately tries to find help for his sister. His mother is out looking after her bees, his grandparents are not where they should be and his father is away in London. His desperation grows as does our anxiety for him and Judith. Then, it slips back in time between chapters from the present day to when Hamnet’s parents meet. Their love is genuine despite the 8-year age gap (Shakespeare is said to be 18) between them and when Agnes falls pregnant, they marry.
In the second half, Agnes comes home to find her child ill. With her herbal remedies and gift for seeing into the future she desperately tries to keep her child alive.
It is imagined that the child falls sick from the plague and the author provides a delightful side story about a flea and its journey from continent to continent via the sea until it comes to rest in the village where it bites Judith. It makes for even more compelling reading given the state of the world we now live in and the migration of our own virus.
The other fascinating thing about this book is Shakespeare’s name is never mentioned, and he is referenced as the tutor, the father, the husband which serves the purpose of pivoting the story squarely on his little-known wife. Indeed, we become familiar with the detail of her everyday life: her marriage, childbirth, living with the in-laws, moving from country to town, the separation from her husband and the subsequent death of her child.
Imagery so fine, that we can imagine ourselves there. “She is drifting through the apartment, touching things as she goes: the back of a chair, an empty shelf, the fire irons, the door handle, the stair rail…. She is … out the apartment’s back door, which leads into a shared yard… she fires the oven in the cookhouse and coaxes the dough into rounds, adding a handful of ground herbs from the kitchen garden.”
Losing a child was more common than it is today but is nevertheless just as painful. No detail of the mother-child bond is spared and the depth of grief is raw with emotion.
The other characters are well drawn and the love between Agnes and her husband and the bond she also has with her brother is moving.
A novel, beautifully crafted and lyrically executed makes this one a joy to read.
This is absolutely superb book that gives the reader an in-depth insight into Shakespeare’s household. Written in sparse, almost poetic prose, and with an exactitude that’s hard to fault, you’ll find yourself so drawn in you won’t be able to put it down.
Obviously well-researched, the research never gets in the way of the unfolding story which tracks back and forth between the days before Hamnet’s birth, to the days of his life, and then the days after his death.
There’s not much more to say about this book, other than that this is a book with depth, and, if you have any interest in Shakespeare at all, you need to read this. One of my ‘Books of the Year’.
What a beautiful book. The prose exquisite. The plot emotional. The journey bittersweet.
Maggie O’Farrell deserves all the praise and awards. I’ll admit that I cried. If you’re a mother, you’ll need a handful of tissues. I adored the book.
Heartstopping. Hamnet does for the Shakespeare story what Jean Rhys did for Jane Eyre, inhabiting it, enlarging it and enriching it in ways that will alter the readers view for ever.
It so happens that the child at the center of Hamnet inspired one of civilization’s most famous plays, but in Maggie O’Farrell’s gifted hands, Hamnet feels as real as my own child. The raw physical life of O’Farrell’s Renaissance England is enthralling. But the beating heart of this book is Hamnet’s mother — an indelible, dauntless woman. What a sensual, full-throated love song to the lost child.
All those glowing reviews from big-time publications are deserved. The author’s prose is beautiful — poetic in a way that never calls attention to itself. And as a work of imagination, of extrapolating a rich story from the few facts we know about Shakespeare’s wife and children, the novel is simply astonishing.
This book immersed me in the world from which Shakespeare came. The book offers a remarkable evocation of the people around him who mattered most to him and shaped his emotional life, and imagines his often-dismissed wife as the perfect partner for the man who so often turned to the natural world for the rich imagery of our emotional lives. In the midst of tragic loss, art has power to sustain us.
Interesting and unpredictable characters during a previous pandemic – the Plague in England. Written by an outstanding Irish writer, Maggie O’Farrell.
I’m absolutely gutted by the imagination, description and pure beauty of Maggie O’ Farrell’s prose.
Ten stars!
A novel on the plague is not normally a direction I would drift. But something in the description of the book reeled me in. And I was not disappointed. The characters are real, but the day to day tellings are fictional. It didn’t take long for me to forget that fact, to sink into their worlds. All of the characters are well written, well rounded. The writing was engaging and I was transported.This is a book I will keep on my bookshelves for future re-reads. I highly recommend this book!
For me as a writer Hamnet was a masterclass in how to transport and completely immerse your reader in another world and time period, Shakespeare’s world, but O’Farrell focuses not on the great man himself, but on his wife Agnes and their family. It’s a slow burn but worth taking the time to lose yourself within the pages.
I purchased Hamnet on a whim as I had no knowledge of the book, which as a reviewer of books is shocking to admit, but true nonetheless. I quite like fictional excursions that are set around the time of Shakespeare and also, those which feature him (with the exception of one F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, which marred my vision of Shakespeare for a while). As so little is known about him, he is a great character around which one can speculate; on his life, times and personality. Maggie O’Farrell takes this idea and weaves a very human depiction of the bard, his wife, their marriage and ultimately, the loss of Hamnet, their only son.
I wasn’t sure about this book to start and I think that it comes from the fact that O’Farrell never mentions Shakespeare by name but often in the context of the relationship he has with the person with whom he is interacting in the text i.e. when talking to Agnes, his wife, O’Farrell refers to Shakespeare as “the husband”. I’m not sure why – is it to distance him from the fact that he is so renowned to us as a playwright that she wants to bring him down to Earth in our consciousness by reference solely to his familial relationships? I have to say that initially I found this distracting but once I found my reading rhythm, this was of no consequence.
This was a great book. Charting when Shakespeare meets Agnes when he is a Latin tutor to his strained relationship with his father, through to their marriage and their children and then, of course, to Shakespeare’s imminent departure for London to fulfil his writing ambitions, the book covers less Shakespeare and more Agnes, the wife he left behind. Agnes is a mystic, able to read people easily and this adds an extra element to the story as she senses human emotions and conflicts. In terms of the children, initially the narrative is focused on Hamnet but attention shifts from him to how his death impacts those around him.
The story that O’Farrell creates around Hamnet is one of emotion: it made me cry at one point, so fully immersed was I in her word crafted world. This, to me, is a sign of good fiction: it is not the remembrance of the words themselves but the way that those words have made you feel.
I went into this story blind (it was a book club pick), and I loved it that way. It allowed me to go in blank without any preconceived notions about who and what this book is about.
It was fantastic, beautiful and poignant. A story that will stay with me for a long time.
I don’t want to say more, in case you want to go in not knowing about the main character’s backstory. (if you don’t, I am sure there are plenty of other reviews explaining the characters and plot). What I will say is READ THIS BOOK!
Hamlet’s inspiration. The real story told from the POV of grieving mother, Anne Hathaway (AKA Mrs Shakespeare) whose own place in history is marginalized by the shadow of her famous husband.