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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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Illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Maggie O’Farrell’s moving historical novel Hamnet is a story of deep loss—the death of a child, struck down by an incomprehensibly virulent epidemic—and its impact upon a marriage that was already buckling under almost intolerable strain. The story’s surprise turn is that, though the grief-stricken wife succumbs for years to crippling depression and though the husband absconds and disappears into his work, the marriage miraculously survives, recovers, and becomes stronger. The wife and husband in question are Anne Hathaway (or Agnes, as she was named in her father’s will and as O’Farrell calls her) and William Shakespeare.

The novel begins in the provincial market town Stratford-upon-Avon, where the eleven-year-old Hamnet, the Shakespeares’ only son, is alarmed by the sudden eruption of strange symptoms on the body of his twin sister, Judith: “He stares at them. A pair of quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to hatch. One at her neck, one at her shoulder.” The swollen lymph nodes, or buboes—the dread signs of bubonic plague—seem to have come from nowhere, but in a tour de force of contact-tracing O’Farrell reconstructs the chain of random events and haphazard encounters that could have led the fatal bacterium Yersinia pestis to the Shakespeare house on Henley Street:

The flea that came from the Alexandrian monkey—which has, for the last week or so, been living on a rat, and before that the cook, who died near Aleppo—leaps from the boy [in Murano] to the sleeve of the master glassmaker, whereupon it makes its way up to his left ear, and it bites him there, behind the lobe.

And so it goes, on and on along trade routes by land and by sea, until it reaches Warwickshire in 1596.

To readers living in the shadow of a virus that made its way from a wet market in Hubei province to the nursing home around the corner, the story has a ghastly timeliness, though it is some consolation to note that the bubonic plague that struck Europe repeatedly from the fourteenth century onward was far more lethal than what we have been experiencing, and that, unlike Covid-19, it attacked the young and the old with equal ferocity.

O’Farrell brilliantly conveys the horror and devastation the plague brought to individual households—such as Shakespeare’s, as she imagines it—and to entire communities. There is no evidence of what actually killed Shakespeare’s son in 1596, but plague is a reasonable hypothesis. An outbreak in Stratford in 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, took the lives of around a fifth of the population, and the disease recurred throughout the century with nightmarish frequency.

The surviving records of Shakespeare’s life are scanty; those of his wife still scantier. At the age of eighteen he married a woman eight years older than he, and by the time he reached twenty-one, he had fathered three children. This much is clear. And then he evidently abandoned them, leaving them in Stratford, where he was born, and heading off to the capital to write or to act or to do whatever it was that he imagined he was going to do. True, as the years passed, he returned from London from time to time, presumably to visit his wife; his eldest daughter, Susanna; the twins Judith and Hamnet; and his aging parents. And, as his wealth increased, he sent money back to Stratford, resettled his family in a very large brick-and-timber house, and made a succession of local real estate and commodity investments.

To that extent he remained connected. But it is telling that there were no more children born to Agnes and Will, and there is no evidence that the busy playwright shared his rich inner world with his wife or that he involved himself in the daily lives of his offspring.

Archival records suggest that actors who came from the provinces more typically brought their families to London and settled them there. And if the sonnets have any autobiographical truth to them, his most intense emotional and sexual interests lay outside the bounds of his marriage. Between the family in the house on Henley Street in Stratford and the poet in his rented rooms on Silver Street in London, there seems to have been an almost unbridgeable distance.

Biographers presume that Shakespeare must have rushed home in 1596 when his eleven-year-old son Hamnet fell gravely ill from unknown causes, but even that is by no means certain. The boy died in August and Stratford was a two-day ride from London, so it is possible that when word reached the playwright it was already too late. Had there been any warning signs? Did he get the news by letter? Or did someone speak some such words as are heard in a brief exchange in The Winter’s Tale : “Your son…is gone.” “How, ‘gone’?” “Is dead.”

If these words from a late play are somehow linked to what Shakespeare actually experienced in 1596, they are displaced from autobiography and absorbed into someone else’s story; this is how the terrible news reaches a character named Leontes. There was no general inhibition in this period from writing directly from personal experience; quite the contrary. When an outbreak of bubonic plague took his seven-year-old son Benjamin, Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson gave voice in an exquisite twelve-line poem to his bitterly painful leave-taking:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;   My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy. Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,   Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father now! For why   Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,   And if no other misery, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, “Here doth lie   Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.” For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,   As what he loves may never like too much.

It is striking that Shakespeare, as far as we know, left nothing comparable to so direct an expression of parental grief. Though this is the same author who wrote startlingly intimate poems to the young man and the dark lady and, in the words of a contemporary, circulated these “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” Shakespeare seems to have drawn an impenetrable curtain around his feelings, whatever they were, for his family.

In 1616, as he lay dying at the age of fifty-two, Shakespeare signed, in a shaky hand, a will that made many bequests, sentimental and otherwise. To his younger sister Joan he bequeathed £20 “and all my wearing apparrell,” along with the right to live in part of the house on Henley Street—the house in which she and her brother had grown up—for a nominal rent. To John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage, fellow actors and shareholders in the Globe Theater, he bequeathed twenty-six shillings and eightpence each to buy mourning rings, and he gave the same sum to his lifelong friend Hamnet Sadler “to buy him a ringe.” To Thomas Combe, the twenty-seven-year-old relative of a business associate, he left the sword that likely would have gone to his son Hamnet, had he lived.

These provisions—including the sum of £10 to “the poore of Stratford”—are the record of a thoughtful man who has accumulated a great deal of property to dispose of, from the “broad silver gilt” bowl in his grand house to the “barnes, stables, orchardes, gardens, landes, tenementes” that he owned throughout Stratford-upon-Avon and its surrounding villages. He was explicitly concerned to keep Thomas Quiney, the husband of his daughter Judith, from getting his hands on the money she would inherit. And he was equally explicitly concerned to settle most of his substantial estate on his elder daughter, Susanna, married to Dr. John Hall, and on her male heirs.

What is famously notable is the apparent absence of any significant bequest to his wife of thirty-four years. Various explanations have been offered, most plausibly that by custom and perhaps by law she would, as his widow, have been entitled during her lifetime to enjoy a portion of his estate. Still, a glance at comparable wills drawn up by people in Shakespeare’s milieu calls attention to what seems to be missing. From the will of his friend Henry Condell: “I give devise and bequeath all & singuler my freehold Messuages landes Tenementes and hereditamentes whatsoever…unto Elizabeth my welbeloved wife.” From the great actor Richard Burbage: “He the said Richard, did nominate and appoint his welbeloved wife Winifride Burbage, to be his sole Executrix of all his goodes and Chattelles whatsoever.” Likewise the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe: “I give and bequeath unto Agnes Henslow my loving wife, all and singuler my Landes, Tenementes, hereditamentes and Leases whatsoever.” William Bird, the lead actor in the Earl of Pembroke’s Men: “All other of my goods and chattells whatsoever…I give and bequeath unto my dearly beloved wiefe Marie Bird.” And the actor Thomas Downton, also of Pembroke’s Men: “I do make & Constitvte Iayne my welbeloved & Constant wife my sole Exectatrixe of all my personall Estate.” The list could go on.

The sense of something missing is heightened rather than relieved by a single line evidently inserted, after the document was already drawn up, into Shakespeare’s will: “I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture.” That’s it. No “loving,” no “dearly beloved,” no “well-beloved and constant,” let alone any hint of the sentiment that led his friend John Heminges to direct that he be buried as near as possible “to my loueinge wife Rebecca.” When Shakespeare contemplated his final resting place, he wanted only to lie undisturbed: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.”

Maggie O’Farrell constructs a very different story from the unhappy marriage suggested, to me at least, by these scattered archival traces. To be sure, in her telling, the absent father does not return to Stratford in time to witness the terminal illness of Hamnet. He arrives in time only for the laying out of the corpse and the bleak funeral. Then, to the intense distress of his wife and muttering something inadequate about his theater company, his season, and his preparation, he soon leaves again for London. But that apparent abandonment is folded into what O’Farrell imagines as a story of deep, enduring love.

Though she is in a distinct minority, O’Farrell is not the first to imagine it so. Already in the nineteenth century some biographers suggested that the best bed would have been reserved for visitors and that the second-best bed must have had sentimental value. Hence, in Hamnet , Susanna takes over some of the household tasks from her grieving mother and, at her father’s bidding, buys new furniture for the house, but Agnes “refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.”

As for the absence from the will of terms of endearment, these are mere conventions, and the most eloquent writer the world has ever known would hardly have needed or welcomed recourse to such trite phrases. The deepest emotional bonds may be precisely those that are literally inexpressible. Within his own family O’Farrell’s Shakespeare—who is never referred to in the novel by name but only as “he” or “her husband” or “the father” and the like—is a man of conspicuously few words. Even his courtship of Agnes, as O’Farrell depicts it, is a string of monosyllables and silences: “‘I…’ he begins, without any idea where that sentence will go, what he wants to say. ‘Do you…’”

As O’Farrell acknowledges, her vision of the Shakespeare marriage is indebted to a 2007 book by Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife. In Greer’s account Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare was an impressive person who has been dismissed, belittled, and slandered by centuries of misogynistic male historians and critics. “The Shakespeare wallahs”—among whom, I regret to say, I prominently figure for Greer—

have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him.

Speaking for myself, I never thought that Shakespeare was “incapable of relating to women,” only that he seems to have been incapable of relating to his wife. And I have never been inclined to vilify Agnes or to blame her in any way for her husband’s neglect or aversion.

With considerable energy and resourcefulness, Greer combs the surviving records for signs that Agnes was an accomplished and steadfastly loyal wife. Shakespeare scholars have not, so far as I know, embraced her suggestion that Agnes was responsible for the creation of the First Folio or that she may have written a still-undiscovered will leaving money “in trust to be spent on further publishing of her husband’s work,” but O’Farrell, for one, has been inspired by Greer’s effort to imagine a wife more substantial than the one James Joyce described as a “boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.” And the result is a satisfying and engaging novel that conjures up the life of a strong, vulnerable, lonely, and fiercely independent woman.

O’Farrell does Greer one better by depicting Agnes as what the Renaissance would have called a “wisewoman,” that is, a healer with special powers. Those powers derive for the most part from a deep understanding of the medicinal properties of plants, but there is something uncanny about what she can do. The first time Agnes and Shakespeare meet—at the country farm where the teenage Shakespeare is tutoring her stepbrothers in Latin—Agnes takes his hand and, gripping the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, mysteriously divines his inner nature. She discovers

something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town…. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents…. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them.

It is easy to forgive O’Farrell the shopworn phrase “bigger than both of them” since it gestures toward what must have seemed, to anyone capable of perceiving it, indescribably strange about Shakespeare’s inner landscape.

The magnitude of that landscape, in O’Farrell’s account, is what drew Shakespeare to Agnes but what also drove him to leave her and their three children and the rest of his family, including his parents, and head off on his own to London. As the novel depicts them, Shakespeare’s mother was narrowly conventional and his father, a glover, was a drunken, irascible brute. To escape from them was a necessity. But the budding playwright wanted his beloved Agnes to join him. It was she, in O’Farrell’s reckoning, who always found a reason to delay: “Until spring comes. Until the heat of summer is over. When the winds of autumn are past. When the snow has melted.” Her motive was to preserve the lives of their precious children, to guard them from the hazards of the disease-ridden city. To this end she was willing to subordinate her deep love for her husband. And it is here, in her predominating maternal solicitude, that the novel finds its real life.

For disease and death haunted not only the crowded cities of Tudor England but also its country towns and leafy rural settlements. Given the general state of Renaissance medical knowledge, a sick person stood a better chance with the plant-based cures of a wisewoman such as O’Farrell’s Agnes than with the hideous cuppings and purges of the best Padua-trained physician. Little Hamnet, frightened by the sudden illness of his twin sister, is right to be desperately seeking his mother. But she is out in the fields, more than a mile away, collecting herbs for her healing practice. By the time she returns home, the symptoms on the little girl’s body of bubonic plague are unmistakable, and with every passing moment they are getting worse.

Narrating severe illness is for O’Farrell a personal specialty. In her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death , she describes a childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year and from which she was not expected to recover, and, still more harrowing, she depicts in excruciating, searing detail her infant daughter’s immune-system disorder:

Her skin is bubbling and blistering, each breath a struggling symphony of whistles and wheezes. Her face, under the scarlet hives, under the grotesque swelling, is ghastly white.

I think: she cannot die, not now, not here. I think: how could I have let this happen?

O’Farrell brings this direct personal experience to bear as she imagines all of Agnes’s frantic efforts to save her daughter and her irrational but unbearable feelings of responsibility. Ultimately, as we know, it was not Judith who died but her twin brother. (Judith in historical fact lived to the age of seventy-seven, dying in 1662.) Here the novel has recourse to the occult forces that had earlier accounted for Agnes’s prescient reading of her young suitor’s hand. Hamnet silently and mysteriously wills himself to take his sister’s place in the clutches of death, leaving Judith to recover as if her mother’s herbal remedies had saved her.

The recovery only intensifies Agnes’s tormenting guilt, for she feels that she somehow failed to focus her attention adequately upon the boy, and she plunges into a grief that is not unmixed with anger at her husband for not being there when she most needed him. Her anger intensifies when, having laid his son in the ground, Shakespeare announces his intention to return to London. But even in the midst of her anger, Agnes, as O’Farrell suggests, must have understood what was impelling him to leave. “You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish,” she tells him:

“What place? You mean London?”

“No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child.”

After her husband leaves, Agnes succumbs to what we would now call clinical depression. And lest we think that such depression is a novelist’s historical anachronism—that parents in the early modern period must have been hardened to the death of children, since it was so terribly common—we might consider the diary of Richard Napier, a seventeenth-century Buckinghamshire astrological physician. The historian Michael MacDonald, who deciphered Napier’s voluminous notes and analyzed them in a remarkable 1981 book called Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England , found that the physician treated numerous parents, and especially mothers, who were “ever leaden with grief” after a child’s death. As William Paulet, the Marquis of Winchester, had written in 1586, “The love of the mother is so strong, though the child be dead and laid in the grave, yet always she hath him quick in her heart.”

Such is the burden, brilliantly depicted, of O’Farrell’s Agnes. Her depression lasts for years, and, though it feels as if it could never get worse, it is intensified when she learns, to her horror, that her husband has written a play that bears her son’s name. (The names Hamnet and Hamlet in this period were interchangeable.) How, she asks herself, could he have been so callous as to exploit for mass entertainment his family’s intimate tragedy?

In the novel’s climactic scene, Agnes travels to London to confront her husband. There, in the midst of the general urban filth and confusion, she has two revelations. Her first comes when she rushes to his rooms. She does not find him there, but, crucially, she finds no sign that anyone besides the playwright has been there. This is the room of a solitary writer—no trace of a lover, male or female. On his desk there is a letter to her that he has begun but left unfinished. The second and still greater revelation comes when she pays her penny, thrusts herself amid the heaving crowd, and enters the wooden O of the Globe. There on the raised stage she sees her husband, his face made up in ghastly white, playing the part of a ghost, the ghost, as the characters around him say and the crowd repeats, of Hamlet:

To hear that name, out of the mouths of people she has never known and will never know, and used for an old dead king: Agnes cannot understand this. Why would her husband have done it?

Thoroughly disgusted, she is readying herself to leave when she is transfixed by the appearance on stage of another character, a boy, or rather a young man, with the precise mannerisms of the dead Hamnet—“walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice”—and at just the age he would have been, had he lived. For a moment she is utterly baffled, and then the meaning of it all comes over her: “Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can.”

To perform this extraordinary feat, she suddenly understands, her husband, in taking on the role of the ghost, has taken his child’s death and made it his own: “He has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.” The reader of the novel also knows, as Agnes cannot, that in offering himself in place of the other, Shakespeare has in effect done for his son what his son did for his gravely ill sister. What Agnes can and does know is that through the power of art her husband has redeemed himself and saved whatever he could of his lost son.

Did it actually happen this way? Almost certainly not. Was the moribund marriage saved? I doubt it. But I too am convinced that Shakespeare drew upon his grief and mourning to write the astonishing, transformative play that bears his son’s name. With her touching fiction O’Farrell has not only painted a vivid portrait of the shadowy Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare but also found a way to suggest that Hamnet was William Shakespeare’s best piece of poetry.

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Maggie O'Farrell

372 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2020

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

“The moment she has feared most, the event she has thought about, mulled over, turned this way and that, rehearsed and re-rehearsed in her mind, during the dark of sleepless nights, at moments of idleness, when she is alone.”

“She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her.”

*(No offense meant to my vegetarian brethren. I blame the metaphor.)

“They beg her to stop, not to touch people’s hands, to hide this odd gift. No good will come of it, her father says, standing over Agnes as she crouches by the fire, no good at all. When she reaches up to take his hand, he snatches it away. She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. 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 grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.”

“She is rarely wrong. About anything. It's a gift or a curse, depending on who you ask.'

* Almost every page is like this: “Several streets away, the owl leaves its perch, surrendering itself to a cool draught, its wings silently breasting the air, its eyes alert. To it, the town appears as a series of rooftops, with gullies of streets in between, a place to be navigated. The massed leaves of trees present themselves as it flies, the stray wisps of smoke from idle fires. It sees the progress of the fox, a man, sleeping in the doorway of a tavern, scratching at a fleabite on his shin; it sees coneys in a cage at the back of someone’s house; horses standing in a paddock near the inn; and it sees Judith, stepping into the street.”

‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say – and what you might not – before you say it. It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’

“He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live. She will say all this to her husband, later, after the play has ended, after the final silence has fallen, after the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage.”

It is to him she speaks in her disordered mind, not the trees, not the magic cross, not the patterns and markings of lichen, not even to her mother, who died while trying to give birth to a child. Please, she says to him, inside the chamber of her skull, please come back. I need you. Please. I should never have schemed to send you away. Make sure this child has safe passage; make sure it lives; make sure I survive to care for it. Let us both come through this. Please. Let me not die. Let me not end up cold and stiff in a bloodied bed.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

[She] refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.

For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet. The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.

It’s like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle. Their two He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same. ‘You shall be well,’ she murmurs. He grips her fingers in anger. ‘I shall not.’ He passes his tongue over his lips, tasting salt. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’

Then the idea strikes him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. It occurs to Hamnet, as he crouches there, next to her, that it might be possible to hoodwink Death, to pull off the trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young: to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other.

The fleas that leapt from the dying rats into their striped fur crawl down into these boxes and take up residence in the rags padding the hundreds of tiny, multi-coloured millefiori beads (the same rags put there by the fellow worker of the master glassmaker; the same glassmaker who is now in Murano, where the glassworks is at a standstill, because so many of the workers are falling ill with a mysterious and virulent fever).

It is tall, cloaked in black, and in the place of a face is a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the beak of a gigantic bird. ‘No,’ Hamnet cries, ‘get away.’ .. Then his grandmother is there, pushing him aside, apologising to the spectre, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about it, inviting it to step into the house, to examine the patient. Hamnet takes a step backwards and another. He collides with his mother, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispers. ‘It is only the physician.’ ‘The . . .?’ Hamnet stares at him, still there on the doorstep, talking with his grandmother. ‘But why is he . . .?’ Hamnet gestures to his face, his nose. ‘He wears that mask because he thinks it will protect him,’ she says. ‘From the pestilence?’ His mother nods. ‘And will it?’ His mother purses her lips, then shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.

If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.

‘Madam,’ the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, ‘you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these.

She thinks of her garden, of her shelves of powders, potions, leaves, liquids, with incredulity, with rage. What good has any of that been? What point was there to any of it? All those years and years of tending and weeding and pruning and gathering. She would like to go outside and rip up those plants by their roots and fling them into the fire. She is a fool, an ineffectual, prideful fool. How could she ever have thought that her plants might be a match for this?

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.

It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here.

And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.

‘the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,’

It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud. Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits.

What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?

Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

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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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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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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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by Kristin Hannah

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SEEN & HEARD

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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Review: Shakespeare’s son died of plague, inspiring “Hamlet” — and a new novel about grief

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Maggie O’Farrell ’s eighth novel, “ Hamnet ,” is nominally a work of historical fiction. But its core subject is the kind of unchecked, ravaging despair that follows the death of a child. The author, whose memoir “ I Am, I Am, I Am ” covered the near-death experiences of herself and her ailing daughter, understands the parental terror of a child’s suffering.

After Hamnet dies, his twin sister Judith asks, “Will he never come back?” It is then that her mother, Agnes, first sobs, finding “she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusions but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.” There’s the rub, as William Shakespeare wrote in “ Hamlet .” A parent who is not alone in grief must also bear the grief of her family.

About that family, whose surname we never learn: a brief introductory explanation reminds us that Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, lost a son named Hamnet to the bubonic plague. Elizabethan naming conventions were loose: Anne/Agnes/Annis could all be names for the same person, as could Hamnet/Hamlet. Not long after losing his son, William wrote “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” a play about the depths of grief and the impossible quest for justice.

Rather than tracking the Bard, O’Farrell has focused on Shakespeare’s wife and three children (Susannah, the eldest, and Hamnet and Judith, 11). The story begins with Hamnet discovering his twin sick and feverish; when he finds the house empty and seeks help, his grandfather John deals him a nasty blow, just as he had beaten the young Will. Of course we don’t know that. So little is known about the real-life Shakespeare and his family that O’Farrell’s creative license is near-infinite.

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As Hamnet races to find an adult, we meet the petulant Susannah, his work-worn grandmother Mary, his stolid uncle Bartholomew and many other Stratford characters. His mother, Agnes, is drawn most finely, out in the meadows checking her bee skeps, woven of hemp. Although later we’ll have more scenes of Agnes and various herbs and potions, it’s here that we “see” her for the first time — and we will never forget how she guides her tiny buzzing workers “gently, ever so gently.”

Her own mother long dead, Agnes defied her sour stepmother, Joan, by falling in love with the young man (tiny hoop dangling from his ear, as in famous etchings) who had been hired to tutor her younger brothers in order to work off his family’s debt to the Hathaways. Never has there been a more passionate scene of youthful sex in an apple storage room.

O’Farrell’s novel isn’t only about grief — or not any more than “Hamlet” is. The novelist calls our attention to the world around her characters, the sensual, sensory world available to us all (not just Elizabethans) but so often glossed over as we go about mundane tasks. There are lovely metaphors and similes — tears “like heavy pearls,” death as a snow-filled landscape — but also passages rich in detail: “Apples ... He brings one up to his face and inhales the scent, sharp, specific, acidic. It brings a slew of distant images to mind: fallen leaves, sodden grass, woodsmoke, his mother’s kitchen.”

Untethered by dates or events, the story loses historicity and gains immediacy, so that even as we know Hamnet will die, we suffer his passing as a shock: “Her son’s body is in a place of torture, of hell. It writhes, it twists, it buckles and strains.” He dies fast and in agony while his twin heals, catching Agnes emotionally unaware. Although she delays the preparation of her son’s small form for as long as possible, in defiance of authorities, her husband does not return from London until Hamnet is shrouded.

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Naturally — as naturally as the bees leave the skep when smoked out — death threatens to break the bond between father and mother, husband and wife. Agnes looks at her husband as they leave the graveyard, “and it is as if she has never seen him before, so odd and distorted and old do his features seem.” He cannot cry, instead pacing their second floor “like someone trying to find their way back to a place for which they have lost the map.”

O’Farrell moves through the family’s pain like a master of signs and signals. Agnes and her daughter Judith make candles, discussing the word “for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin,” and “Judith watches the liquid slide off the ends of the wicks, into the bowl below. ‘Maybe there isn’t one,’ she suggests. ‘Maybe not,’ says her mother.” The melting, shape-shifting tallow echoes the family’s slow move from a season of grief into a season of change.

But change does not always mean healing. In London, the father busies himself with his writing and company of actors, for “the magnitude, the depth of his wife’s grief for their son exerts a fatal pull. . . . he must hold himself separate in order to survive.” So much comes between them, and perhaps it is no spoiler to say that they are brought back together — for a moment? For years? — by a performance of “Hamlet” that Agnes witnesses, by an actor directed by her husband to behave just as her Hamnet did. “It is too much: she isn’t sure how to bear it, how to explain this to herself.” As she watches, Agnes realizes that her husband “has taken his son’s death and made it his own.”

In “Hamnet,” art imitates life not to co-opt reality, but to help us bear it.

Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell Knopf: 320 pages, $27

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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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Book Review: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

By: Author Jen - MMB Book Blog

Posted on Published: 22 June 2021  - Last updated: 22 July 2024

Hamnet is a historical fiction novel by New York Times bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell, published in 2020.

Hamnet won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction , Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards and and was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the year. It was also featured as a “big-hitter” on BBC’s Between The Covers .

Disclosure : This post may include affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases

Genre: Literary Fiction Author: Maggie O’Farrell Buy: Amazon | Waterstones Published: 2020

Little is known about Shakespeare’s son other than he died at age 11 in the 16th century . It’s thought that he possibly died from the  bubonic plague  that killed around one-third of all children below the age of twelve in Elizabethan England

Hamnet is Maggie O’Farrell’s fictional interpretation of the events that unfolded over 400 years ago.

In 1596, a young girl becomes suddenly seriously ill. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches for help as nobody is home. Meanwhile, their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away and their father is working in London.

None of them know that Hamnet will not survive the week.

Hamnet Book Review

Hamnet is a powerful, beautifully written novel. I loved it.  I’d read a review prior to reading the book that commented on the sentence structure and use of commas and I found myself focusing on that at the beginning, rather than the storytelling. However, once I allowed myself to focus on the actual story, I was was gripped.

I loved how William Shakespeare is very much a secondary character, so much so he is never even named. He is referred to as the Latin tutor, the husband and the father, and never by his actual name. This isn’t his story and his name has so many associations with it. I found it a really clever idea to never actually name him.

We know Shakespeare’s wife to be Anne Hathaway, but within the book, she is referred to as Agnes. Agnes is strong, unapologetic and dignified. She’s a really impressive character and I loved reading about her.

It’s strange to read a book when you know how it is going to end. It’s no spoiler to say that Hamnet dies. I felt a feeling of dread as I read on, knowing this sweet, caring boy was going to pass away. I didn’t think I was going to cry because I knew his death was coming, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was heart-breaking to read which is a testament to Maggie O’Farrell’s skill as a writer.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this beautifully written historical novel. It’s a book that will stay with me and has inspired me to visit Stratford-Upon-Avon again. I found it to be deserving of all the praise and awards.

What books are similar to Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell?

If you enjoy novels based on true events in the 16th century you may enjoy The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

If you’re looking to read other winners of the Women’s Prize to Fiction you might want to read Piranesi by Suzanna Clark , The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki or Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS READER FAVORITES MYSTERIES & THRILLERS BEST SELLERS AWARD WINNING BOOKS CLASSIC BOOKS WEEKEND READING WHAT TO READ NEXT POPULAR BOOKS SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER What's Better Than Books? Book Reviews, Author Interviews, Guest Posts, Ratings, and More! #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. Website | Facebook Share this: Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed . Member Login Library Patron Login Get a Free Issue of our Ezine! Claim Reviews of Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio BookBrowse Review: Critics' Consensus: Readers' Rating: First Published: Jul 21, 2020, 320 pages May 2021, 320 pages Historical Fiction UK (Britain) & Ireland 17th Century or Earlier Dealing with Loss Top 20 Best Books of 2020 Publication Information Write a Review Buy This Book About This Book Reading Guide 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! "Beyond the Book" articles Free books to read and review (US only) Find books by time period, setting & theme Read-alike suggestions by book and author Book club discussions and much more! Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months. More about membership! National Book Critics Circle Awards 2020 Media Reviews 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 Full Review (666 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today . (Reviewed by Rachel Hullett ). Write your own review! Beyond the Book Anne hathaway and hamnet shakespeare. This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access. Read-Alikes Genres & Themes If you liked Hamnet, try these: Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons Published 2024 About this book More by this author The most exciting historical retelling of 2023: a subversive, powerful untelling of Romeo and Juliet by New York Times bestselling author Natasha Solomons. Was the greatest ever love story a lie? Henry Henry by Allen Bratton Crackling with intelligence and wit, Henry Henry is a brilliant recasting of the Henriad in which Hal Lancaster is a queer protagonist for a new era. Books with similar themes Become a Member BookBrowse Book Club Members Recommend Everything We Never Knew by Julianne Hough A dazzling, heartwarming novel from Emmy winner Julianne Hough and Rule author Ellen Goodlett. The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao A love story set against India's political turmoil, where two young people defy social barriers. Solve this clue: The A O M E and be entered to win.. Win This Book Follow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhail A reimagining of the intrepid woman who braved treacherous waters on the first steamboat voyage to conquer the Mississippi River. Free Weekly Newsletters Discover what's happening in the world of books: reviews, previews, interviews, giveaways, and more plus when you subscribe, we'll send you a free issue of our member's only ezine.. Spam Free : Your email is never shared with anyone; opt out any time. Find anything you save across the site in your account Briefly Noted Stranger in the Shogun’s City , by Amy Stanley (Scribner) . This history of nineteenth-century Japan follows Tsuneno, the daughter of a village priest, who learns that “to be a woman is to grow up and leave for another household.” But, after three failed marriages, she departs for the great city of Edo (present-day Tokyo). Tsuneno’s rebellious trajectory, preserved in her family’s archive, was unusual, yet even her most commonplace steps are absorbing. Although her squabbles and triumphs (a dispute about a kimono, a new job as maid of all work to a samurai family) can only be glimpsed, Stanley’s careful speculation fills the lacunae, evoking Edo’s back alleys and law courts, its fashion and food. Tsuneno, with her world in flux—the shogun will soon fall—becomes just one person in the teeming city. The Turnaway Study , by Diana Greene Foster (Scribner) . The author led a ten-year study of a thousand women, comparing those who received abortions shortly before reaching a state’s gestational limit with those who did not—because they didn’t learn early enough that they were pregnant, couldn’t travel to a provider, or couldn’t afford the escalating costs of a later abortion. Drawing on her research and on first-person narratives, the book illustrates how women denied abortions were more likely to struggle financially, suffer domestic violence, and experience short-term anxiety, while women who obtained abortions tended to experience better physical and mental health. One woman, reflecting on an abortion that enabled her to focus on her teen-age daughter and find a job, says, “It’s an ordinary life, but it’s an extravagant, wonderful ordinary life.” Hamnet , by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf) . Breathing life into what little we know about Shakespeare’s family, this exceptional historical novel is set in 1596, in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Hamnet, eleven years old, tries to help his plague-stricken twin sister, as their mother, Agnes, makes curative potions, and their father (referred to obliquely as “the tutor”) is off in London, writing plays. O’Farrell’s account of the spread of the disease is all too timely, and there is an inspired scene in which the twins, in true Shakespearean fashion, trade places. At the center is the grief-stricken Agnes, whose husband’s genius requires her to bear monumental loss alone. “The place in your head,” she tells him. “You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else.” Interlibrary Loan , by Gene Wolfe (Tor) . Wolfe, a celebrated science-fiction writer who died in 2019, stretched the genre’s boundaries in his rich and allusive work. His final novel is set in a future North America, where libraries loan out clones of authors. The protagonist, a “reclone” of a prolific mystery writer, is borrowed by an emotionally disturbed woman who hopes that he will help her solve the mystery of a “treasure map” she has stolen from her estranged husband. Wolfe deploys sci-fi and gothic elements—an interplanetary portal, a sentient house that builds itself—to explore the question that lies at the heart of many of his novels: What does it mean to be human and alive? About The Film Hamnet is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 New York Times bestselling novel which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and The Women’s Prize for Fiction. Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. Shelf Life: Abi Daré The author of The Girl with the Louding Voice and And So I Roar takes our literary survey. And So I Roar by Abi Daré Abi Daré’s second book, And So I Roar (Dutton), picks up days after her last book, the 2020 NYT-bestselling The Girl with the Louding Voice ends. For that book, she won the Desmond Elliott Prize, British Book Awards Best Book of The Year, the Nigeria Prize for Literature (Africa’s largest literary Prize), and the Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts. She bought an electronic toothbrush for her taxation professor mother with some of the prize money, but it was Daré’s daughter who, complaining about having to load the dishwasher, sparked the idea for the story about a 14-year-old housemaid in Lagos, Nigeria. ( Bridgerton actress Adjoa Andoh will narrate the audiobook of And So I Roar .) The Lagos-born and -raised, Essex, UK-based author studied law at University of Wolverhampton, earned master’s degrees (with distinction) in creative writing from Birkbeck, University of London (the book , which took three years, was part of her dissertation) and in international project management at Glasgow Caledonian University, where she also received an honorary doctorate of letters. She founded the Louding Voice Educational and Empowerment Foundation, which provides scholarships to girls in rural Nigeria (her title: Chief Louding Officer); collaborates with companies to incorporate storytelling in their businesses; is a board member of the BIC Corporate Foundation; works for an academic publisher in project management; contributed an essay to Of This Our Country about Nigerian identity; was a judge for the Queen ’s Commonwealth Essay Competition (and was a guest at Buckingham Palace to meet the winners); hasn’t finished a TV series in some time; considered selling shoes and quitting writing; once self-published Christian fiction and edited her church newsletter; and worked at a jewelry store when she first moved to the UK. Inspirations: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey . Likes: Teaching, cafes, the sound of rain (but needs silence when editing), hazelnut lattes , puff-puff (a Nigerian doughnut-like snack), the Louding Voice chair her publishers gave to her for her first book. Curl up with one of her recs below. The book that: …helped me through a breakup or a loss:. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. I read this about 20 years ago while at emotional crossroads and found its themes of resilience and finding strength through adversity incredibly comforting. …made me miss a train stop: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. I read this while traveling from London to Manchester and very nearly missed my stop on the train. It was that good. It made me cry too. …made me weep uncontrollably: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. The depth of the characters’ suffering and the beauty of their enduring hope broke my heart. …I recommend over and over again: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Its exploration of friendship, betrayal, and redemption is timeless and universally resonant. ...shaped my worldview: The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Walker’s portrayal of resilience in the face of systemic oppression and personal trauma broadened my understanding of human strength and dignity. ...made me rethink a long-held belief: A Thousand Splendid Suns painted Afghanistan’s beauty and showed the devastation of war, making me reconsider my preconceived notions about the country and its people. …I swear I’ll finish one day: Ulysses by James Joyce. I don’t even know where to start with this one. Everyone talks about how brilliant it is, and I want to join the conversation, but I’m unsure how! ...I read in one sitting; it was that good: Room by Emma Donoghue. The child narrator’s voice and the story’s harrowing yet hopeful journey kept me hooked from the first page to the last. …currently sits on my nightstand: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. I’m captivated by its raw portrayal of mental health and relationships. …I’d pass on to a kid: The Famous Five series by Enid Blyton. These classic adventure stories are perfect for igniting a love of reading in children. …I’d give to a new graduate: The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. Its insights into finding meaning and direction can be incredibly grounding during life transitions. …made me laugh out loud: I LOVED Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. Its sharp wit and humorous take on suburban life had me in stitches. …I’d like turned into a TV show: Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams . The protagonist’s vibrant personality and complex life would make for compelling viewing. …I first bought: It must have been one of the Famous Five novels by Enid Blyton. Begged my mother to buy this on one of her trips back from the UK because I was so convinced I was one of the Famous Five. These books sparked my lifelong love of reading. …I last bought: White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Her portrayal of multicultural London is both hilarious and deeply insightful. …has the best title: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume . The title captures the essence of adolescence with a simple yet profound question. …has the best opening lines: The first line in Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng . “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” sucked me right in. …has the greatest ending: The Kite Runner . It’s such a difficult one to answer. The ending of this book brings a sense of catharsis and hope that stays with you long after you’ve finished the book. …broke my heart: The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma. The unraveling of brotherly bonds against the backdrop of Nigerian folklore was profoundly tragic. …features a character I love to hate: Martha Friel’s complexity and flaws in Sorrow and Bliss make her both frustrating and utterly compelling. …helped me become a better writer: The Color Purple . Its epistolary form and raw emotional honesty taught me the power of voice and perspective. …grew on me: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. Initially slow, but the humour and depth of character development won me over. …is a master class on dialogue: White Teeth . The multiculturalism portrayed in this book is excellent, with witty and true-to-life dialogue that makes the characters feel real. …describes a house I’d want to live in or a place I’d want to visit: The mansion in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Manderley’s gothic charm and eerie beauty are irresistibly alluring. …should be on every college syllabus: The Color Purple . Its exploration of race, gender, and resilience is essential reading for understanding human rights and dignity. …I’ve re-read the most: The Color Purple . Its powerful narrative and emotional depth draw me back again and again. …I consider literary comfort food: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Its atmospheric storytelling and timeless intrigue provide a perfect escape. …I would have blurbed if asked: Every single book I’ve bought! Each one offers something unique and valuable. …I never returned to the library (mea culpa): It’s funny, I always buy books and then donate to the library! …sealed a friendship: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. For some reason, I didn’t connect with this book at the first try, my friend kept on trying to convince me to give it another go. I am glad I did! Discussing its themes, characters, and emotional impact brought us closer! …inspired me to donate to a cause: A Thousand Splendid Suns . Its portrayal of Afghan women’s struggles motivated me to support women’s education globally. …makes me feel seen: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo . Its diverse narratives and intersectional perspectives resonate deeply with my own experiences. …features the coolest book jacket: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. The cover’s lush, evocative artwork is as mesmerizing as the writing. …everyone should read: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood . Its chilling dystopia and powerful feminist themes are thought-provoking. …I could only have discovered at a quaint independent bookstore in London: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. McBride’s masterful storytelling and richly drawn and often humorous characters create a vivid portrait of a diverse neighborhood coming together in the face of adversity. A complete gem! …fills me with hope: The Purpose Driven Life . Its guidance on living a meaningful life is profoundly uplifting. …surprised me: Rebecca . Its unexpected twists and psychological depth kept me on my toes. …I’d want signed by the author: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Her poignant storytelling and brilliant writing deserve a treasured autograph. …I asked for as a kid: Malory Towers by Enid Blyton. I loved the adventures and friendships at the boarding school. Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be: Stuttgart City Library (Stuttgart, Germany). Give me a tiny room in this modern architectural marvel with its pristine white, minimalist design and I’d be happy! It’s such a serene and visually stunning haven for book lovers! The literary charity I support: Women’s Global Education Project . This amazing charity empowers women and girls in Kenya, a cause close to my heart. Read Daré’s Picks: I know why the caged bird sings by maya angelou, hello beautiful by ann napolitano, a thousand splendid suns by khaled hosseini, the kite runner by khaled hosseini, the color purple by alice walker, ulysses by james joyce, room by emma donoghue, sorrow and bliss by meg mason, five on a treasure island by enid blyton, the purpose driven life by rick warren, big little lies by liane moriarty, queenie by candice carty-williams, white teeth by zadie smith, are you there god it’s me, margaret by judy blume, everything i never told you by celeste ng, the fishermen by chigozie obioma, the bee sting by paul murray, rebecca by daphne du maurier, the book thief by markus zusak, girl, woman, other by bernardine evaristo, the island of missing trees by elif shafak, the handmaid’s tale by margaret atwood, the heaven & earth grocery store by james mcbride, hamnet by maggie o’farrell, malory towers by enid blyton. Shelf Life: Jay Ellis Shelf Life: Jon M. Chu Shelf Life: Keanu Reeves and China Miéville Shelf Life: Jenna Bush Hager Shelf Life: Taffy Brodesser-Akner Shelf Life: J. Courtney Sullivan Shelf Life: Julia Phillips Shelf Life: Griffin Dunne Shelf Life: R.O. Kwon Shelf Life: Miranda July Shelf Life: Claire Messud Advertisement Supported by Fighting for Love and Survival as a Country Falls Apart In his fast-paced novel, Alejandro Puyana recounts the struggles and impossible choices of a family in deeply troubled Venezuela. Share full article By Annie Correal Annie Correal is a staff reporter who has covered migration, immigration and Latin America for The Times. Apple Books Barnes and Noble Books-A-Million Bookshop.org When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. FREEDOM IS A FEAST , by Alejandro Puyana A memorable scene in Alejandro Puyana’s debut novel, “Freedom Is a Feast,” involves three “white city boys” and a bag of blood. It’s the 1960s in the coastal jungles of Venezuela. These young men from Caracas have been taken in by the romance of revolution. And now, by the military that’s trying to crush it. Desperate to escape, they offer a guard a gold tooth filling for the blood of a pig that’s just been slaughtered. One of the prisoners downs the warm blood, expecting to vomit and be taken to a hospital, where he might find a way to get out and save them all. The problem is, he can’t throw up. The scene is an example of how Puyana, an energetic writer from Venezuela who lives in Texas and writes in English, squeezes adventure, even dark comedy, from misery and horror. It’s a Latin American tradition, a coping mechanism turned vocation for authors from Roberto Bolaño to Mariana Enríquez, and though Puyana doesn’t yet have their authority, he daringly tries his hand. His protagonist is Stanislavo Atanas, the city boy who drinks the blood, who has renounced his life of privilege and gone to the jungle to organize villagers, receive arms from Cuba and prove himself in the wake of a family tragedy. In one of many allusions to the complexity of Venezuelan identity, we learn his mother is a Jewish orphan from Poland. He has red hair and looks a little like Van Gogh. (We also learn, from an author’s note, that the character is based on Teodoro Petkoff , a Marxist turned journalist and politician who died in 2018 and to whom Puyana dedicates the book.) Stanislavo is also in love. Before he gets caught by the military, he meets another leftist revolutionary, Emiliana, a steady-handed nurse descended from an Indigenous tribe. Stanislavo’s loyalty to his comrades ultimately leads to a difficult choice with long-lasting consequences. The bulk of the novel takes place decades after the couple’s romance, chronicling what becomes of their shared dream — and of their child, María — under Hugo Chávez, the Socialist strongman who ruled Venezuela for 14 years. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber?  Log in . Want all of The Times?  Subscribe . 388 IMAGES Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, Review and Summary Book review Book Review: ‘Hamnet’ by Maggie O’Farrell Hamnet [Book Review] Hamnet Book Review BOOK REVIEW: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell COMMENTS Shakespeare's Son Died at 11. A Novel Asks How It Shaped His Art In 1596, Hamnet, just 11 years old, died. (The cause of death is unknown; O'Farrell imagines, plausibly, that it was plague.) By then William Shakespeare was an established playwright, living in ... Maggie O'Farrell on 'Hamnet' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review. Maggie O'Farrell Looks for Stories Hiding in Plain Sight Named one of the 10 best books of 2020 by The New York Times Book Review, "Hamnet" is incredibly engrossing and sometimes playful, even though it is about the death of a child. It reduces many ... Review: 'Hamnet,' By Maggie O'Farrell : NPR 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 ... A Wisewoman in Stratford Stephen Greenblatt. Hamnet imagines a literary legacy for Shakespeare's wife and son. January 14, 2021 issue. Reviewed: Hamnet. by Maggie O'Farrell. Knopf, 305 pp., $26.95. Illustration by Joanna Neborsky. Maggie O'Farrell's moving historical novel Hamnet is a story of deep loss—the death of a child, struck down by an incomprehensibly ... Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet. 'Hamnet' by Maggie O'Farrell book review Review by Ron Charles. July 21, 2020 at 8:00 a.m. EDT. On Aug. 11, 1596, William Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, was buried. He was 11 years old. Almost nothing more is known about the boy's ... Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet: A Review 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. HAMNET HAMNET. 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 ... Review: Shakespeare's son died of plague, inspiring "Hamlet" If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Maggie O'Farrell's eighth novel, "Hamnet," is nominally a ... Hamnet reborn: a pandemic bestseller moves from page to stage 'Hamnet', Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, April 1-June 17; then Garrick Theatre, London, September 30-January 6 2024, rsc.org.uk Sarah Hemming is the FT's theatre critic Hamnet 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 ... All Book Marks reviews for Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell Hamnet is, above all, a profound study of loss ... At her best, O'Farrell is simply outstanding. Within pages, she can inhabit the mind of an owl, of a great playwright, of a dying boy, of those watching him. It seems she can pretty much do anything on the page that she puts her mind to. Book Review: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell Hamnet is a historical fiction novel by New York Times bestselling author Maggie O'Farrell, published in 2020. Hamnet won the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards and and was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the year.It was also featured as a "big-hitter" on BBC's Between The Covers. Hamnet By Maggie O'Farrell- Book Summary + Book Review + Book Club 7. The fathers in the book-John, Hamnet's father, and King Hamlet-all create a physical and/or emotional distance between themselves and their families. How does this affect their children and lineage overall? Consider the ultimate future of the Shakespeare line (in a bodily sense and otherwise) after Hamnet's death. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell The TLS - Mourning and mimesis in Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. A book review of Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. This is a novel about things that are paired and split apart. Twins, most obviously: it features the siblings Hamnet and Judith, the younger two of. This is a novel about things that are paired and split apart. ... New in Paperback: 'Hamnet' and 'All the Way to the Tigers' HAMNET: A Novel of the Plague, by Maggie O'Farrell.(Vintage, 320 pp., $16.95.) At the center of this National Book Critics Circle Award winner — one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of ... Book Review: Hamnet & Judith by Maggie O'Farrell Review: 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. Review of Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell But as reality and fiction often exist in a symbiotic relationship, 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. This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2020, and has been updated for the June 2021 edition. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell: Summary and reviews by Allen Bratton. Published 2024. About this book. Crackling with intelligence and wit, Henry Henry is a brilliant recasting of the Henriad in which Hal Lancaster is a queer protagonist for a new era. We have 15 read-alikes for Hamnet, but non-members are limited to two results. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, review: a sensual retelling of Shakespeare Hamnet, says Maggie O’Farrell, is the “novel I’ve wanted to write for over 30 years”, ever since she learnt at school that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet who died. Briefly Noted Book Reviews One woman, reflecting on an abortion that enabled her to focus on her teen-age daughter and find a job, says, "It's an ordinary life, but it's an extravagant, wonderful ordinary life ... Hamnet (novel) Hamnet is a 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell.It is a fictional account of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, who died at age eleven in 1596, focusing on his parents' grief.In Canada, the novel was published under the title Hamnet & Judith. [1]In 2020, the book won the Women's Prize for Fiction [2] and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; that December, it was also chosen as ... Maggie O'Farrell Review: In 'Hamnet,' Shakespeare Becomes Soap Opera. The Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's hit 2020 novel is elegant and tasteful — but also formulaic and ... Hamnet Hamnet. In Production. Hamnet. In Production. About The Film. Hamnet is based on Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 New York Times bestselling novel which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and The Women's Prize for Fiction. Starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn. Hamnet The story of Agnes - the wife of William Shakespeare - as she struggles to come to terms with the loss of her only son, Hamnet. A human and heart-stopping story as the backdrop to the creation of Shakespeare's most famous play, Hamlet. Review: In 'Hamnet,' Shakespeare Becomes Soap Opera It could be completely inaccurate, but no one can disprove it. Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway married in 1582; he was 18, she was 26 and pregnant with the first of their three children. Two years ... Abi Daré's Book Recommendations Abi Daré's second book, And So I Roar (Dutton), picks up days after her last book, the 2020 NYT-bestselling The Girl with the Louding Voice ends. For that book, she won the Desmond Elliott ... Book Review: 'A Wilder Shore,' by Camille Peri 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review. Book Review: 'Freedom Is a Feast,' by Alejandro Puyana 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review. assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis