Such beautiful writing, it sort of oozes grief but in a good way. I know this book is built round only a few facts about Anne Hathaway and her family but it is still a wonderful read. I did not realise it was such a short book as I have read the epub version but I felt it finished at exactly the right point. My favourite bit was actually the 'flea's journey'. Thanks to Netgalley.

A masterful and evocative telling of the story of Shakespeare’s son, beautifully sensitive and heartfelt. The narrative voice is of its time and takes time to flesh out the characters’ histories, apart from Shakespeare himself, who appears as a shadowy and distant character regarded suspiciously by the people of Stratford and misunderstood by his family. He is not even referred to by name, but as his relationship to others. The setting of his early life is mapped so well by the author, his restless and creative energy waiting to take flight, and inevitably leaving behind a family which is hampered from following him. We get to know his wife as a generous and beautiful woman who has insight into the lives of others, healing with herbs and care. She fails to save her son though and must live with the loss of both him and the distant husband.
I absolutely loved the way the novel spoke to me of private grief and love. The language suited the times, both plain and direct, but also poetic and emotional. A wonderful read, I could not put it down.

Hamnet is the story of a family in Elizabethan England. A glover and his wife, and their children. It’s a hard time, a constant long day of work and making sure there is enough food to go around and enough to keep warm. It topped loads of best books of the year for 2020 so I was excited to read it. It also won the Women’s Prize for Fiction!

The plague is in England, and everyone lives in fear of the buboes appearing, the malady taking you and your family.

The narrators in this story change, swapping between Agnes, the mother of the children of one of the sons of the glover and his wife, and their children. There is some third person narrative too, describing day to day life in the village.

Agnes is such an interesting woman, and her life story is told through memory and flashback. She has a gift for medicine, for healing people using herbs and poultices. She also has a gift for seeing the future, and the past – one which makes a lot of people in the village uncomfortable, none more so than her mother in law, Mary.

Okay, so that’s basically the plot. Most people will know that Hamnet is the name of Shakespeare’s son, who died and is believed to have been the inspiration, or at least referenced in, Hamlet.

I thought the writing was lovely, and the descriptions of life were so vivid that there must have been a lot of research into this. The character of Agnes especially, was compelling and somehow I thought there’d be more of her in it.

I found myself slightly irritated by the knowing references to Shakespearean lore – the fact that we all know he married Anne Hathaway, but this is mentioned that her name may have in fact been Agnes. Shakespeare left her his ‘second best bed’, explained in this novel by way of mentioning that she never liked the new one, and preferred their old one even after his writing started earning more money. There are no doubt hundreds of nods, references etc to Shakespeare and his surroundings that I didn’t pick up on, and this is where I got slightly annoyed – I don’t want to have to read a book to understand the references in this fiction. It’s like watching Avengers Assemble when you haven’t seen any of the others – lots of things just go over your head.

He’s also never referred to by his name, but instead as ‘the Latin tutor’ and perhaps his name has been written a number of different ways.

I liked the angle, the idea of writing about Hamnet, but if I hadn’t made that connection, I don’t think I would have enjoyed the book as much – it would be a story about a family outside of London, living in Elizabethan England. There was a good index with the book which listed the references used, and I think that would be useful.

I feel like this would be a good text to teach alongside a Shakespeare class or module at A’Level or university – it’s a great companion piece, but I don’t think it stands alone. If I didn’t know a bit about Shakespeare, I wouldn’t have followed the story and would have found some of it confusing.

I am glad to have read it though, and I do have another Maggie O’Farrell novel to read so maybe that was the introduction I was looking for?

Thanks to Netgalley and Headline for the Digital Review Copy!

Thank you for the opportunity of reading this book. I have left a review on Goodreads.
Beautifully written, devastatingly heartbreaking.

I just want to thank publisher for granting my wish, but I all ready read this book.

And all I can say that this was just a amazing book, like all the others by Maggie O'Farrell.
I am a huge fan, and I read all her books. Just adore her writing style.
This book is a masterpiece and it should be treated like that.

5 stars all the way.

A wonderful heartbreaking novel. I really loved how it took an aspect of Shakespeare's Life that is little known and made it accessible to us. Should have been Booker shortlisted , definitely

Unbelievable book. I adore Maggie O’Farrell and have read all of her books like a mad woman! This was a different type of novel and in usual form it was wonderful

Maggie O’Farrell is an author I’ve heard a lot about over the years from other bloggers without ever feeling tempted to read myself, but the subject of her latest novel (the death of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, at the age of eleven), appealed to me and I thought I would give it a try.

Despite the title, the focus of the novel is really Shakespeare’s wife, whom O’Farrell calls Agnes; she is more often known as Anne Hathaway, but Agnes is apparently the name by which her father referred to her in his will. Agnes, as she is depicted here, is an unconventional woman who flies a kestrel, has a knowledge of herbs and healing – and, some say, possesses the powers of second sight. Her husband, in contrast, is less well defined as a character. He is never even given a name; he is always ‘the husband’, ‘the father’ or, sometimes, ‘the Latin tutor’.

The novel begins with Hamnet alone in the empty workshop of his grandfather, a glovemaker, desperately searching for an adult who can help him; his sister Judith is unwell and he doesn’t know what to do. His father is in London and Agnes is away tending her beehives. It is some time later when Agnes returns home and hears the news of Judith’s illness and she will always wonder whether things might have played out differently if she had arrived earlier:

"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."

Judith has a disease which appears to be the bubonic plague but we know from the historical records that it is Hamnet who will die. Knowing this in advance doesn’t spoil the story at all because we don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen or under what circumstances or exactly what impact Hamnet’s death is going to have on the people around him; these are things to be decided by the author and explored over the course of the novel. And although many people will be drawn to this book by the Shakespeare connection, I would describe it more as a book about grief and loss. O’Farrell’s portrayals of a grieving mother, a grieving father and grieving siblings – and the differences in the way each of these people handles their grief – are beautifully and poignantly written.

We are also taken back to an earlier time, before Hamnet was even born, when a Latin tutor arrives at the home of a sheep farmer to teach his young sons and becomes captivated with the boys’ half-sister. The tutor, despite not being named, is clearly Shakespeare, and the young woman, of course, is his future wife Agnes. The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time throughout the novel, alternating between the early days of Agnes and Shakespeare’s relationship and the story of Hamnet’s death, which takes place in the summer of 1596.

Although, as I’ve said, the writing is beautiful, the book is written in the third person present tense and that’s something I often dislike. It doesn’t necessarily stop me from enjoying a book (I don’t seem to have a problem with it in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell books, for example) but in general I find it distancing and distracting and that was the case here. Another thing I found jarring was O’Farrell’s decision to avoid using Shakespeare’s name. I can understand that the reason for doing so must have been to keep the focus on Agnes and the children and to prevent it from becoming just another novel about Shakespeare, but she goes to such lengths to find alternative ways to describe him that I felt it actually drew attention to him rather than the other way around. This, and the decision to use the name Agnes instead of the more familiar Anne, makes me wonder whether the links to Shakespeare were really necessary at all; I think the story might have worked just as well with entirely fictional characters.

Finally, I want to mention one of the most memorable sections of the book: a detailed and imaginative description of how the plague which takes Hamnet’s life makes its journey from a glassmaker’s workshop in Venice to the faraway Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon. An aspect of the novel that turned out to be particularly timely and relevant, although O’Farrell couldn’t have known it while she was writing it!

Oh my gosh what a book. I purposely slowed my reading on this so I could really enjoy it. The writing is just beautiful. This novel deserves all the rewards- every last one of them.

This is literary fiction at its best. It explores Shakespeare’s family, never once mentioning by name the man himself. The main narrator being his wife Agnes, their meeting, life and the children they bore. The death of Hamnet (or Hamlet- their only son) being the central theme.

Whilst the topic is sad, don’t let that put you off. There’s plenty of groundwork to read before the death occurs and the style of writing is what keeps you immersed here as a reader. O’Farrell is so descriptive in her writing. I feel like I can picture the characters fully which I always love and she gives you such a feel of what life was like at that time. You become part of it.

This is a beautiful novel. I’m so glad I bought it in hardback as it’s one I’ll want to keep forever. This novel should go down as a classic and I imagine it will.
5🌟 from me.

I cried. So, so much. Maggie O'Farrell's writing is absolutely stunning, as always, and she is historically adept as I expected. BRB, buying for everyone.

I'm not the biggest fan of historical fiction and so this one was a bit strange for me. I love Shakespeare and Hamnet is someone I didn't know much about - we know about William Shakespeare's plays but not that much about his life - so I wanted to know more, even if it is fiction. It was a good but I'm not the best at historical fiction and so it didn't flow throughout for me.

Excellently written. Flows beautifully
A mixture of emotions throughout. One minute your happy the next your sad. But that is classic Shakespeare.
If you enjoy historical fiction then this is for you.
Thank you to both NetGalley and publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book

A masterclass in historical fiction. The setting and atmosphere is perfectly realised, a feast for all the senses and the characters are wonderful. Only the most famous character, the unnamed father, husband, playwright, remains at a remove and it only makes the family lost to history more vivid.

The build-up to the central death is slow as O'Farrell weaves the story of Agnes and the playwright, rehabilitating the bizarrely maligned Anne Hathaway and imagining the life of English literature's most famous name far from his fame. Agnes is unconventional, with a power and insight in her everyday life to rival that that have made her husband's plays so enduring. Fey and otherwordly, confident in her senses and herself she is both enigmatic and magnetic, the kernel of the whole story and everything in it.

The death itself and the aftermath are beautifully captured and genuinely affecting. The whole novel is steeped in grief and loss. The fact that the death is known from the very start only makes its inevitability more poignant. The depth of the grief powerfully challenges the idea that that the commonplace nature of infant mortality in the Middle Ages meant that children were hardly grieved by parents and families.

O'Farrell pays homage to the playwright by weaving common Shakespearean tropes through the lives of his family. Agnes recalls the fairies and the twins delight in swapping roles. She has also spoken about her determination to use no words that were not authentic to the 16th century. Nevertheless, the language and prose are light and dreamlike and fresh and this is one of the few times I have found the present tense to be entirely successful.

This is a worthy contender for the Women's Prize 2020.

‘Hamnet’ is such an enjoyable read and an incredible book!

At first glance you may think this is a tale about Shakespeare. It’s not. In fact, William Shakespeare is very much a background character, this is the story of his wife Agnes and his son, Hamnet. This is a story of motherhood, of family, of grief. Maggie O’Farrell doesn’t even name him in the book and instead uses the words like ‘father’ or ‘husband’ when Shakespeare himself enters a scene. A very clever way of making a book about Shakespeare not really about him at all!

‘Hamnet’ takes place over two interweaving timelines. We meet Agnes as a young woman, we witness her first meeting with her brother’s tutor (Shakespeare) and we see a relationship blossom. We also get to see where their relationship ends up, as the timeline also concentrates on the period fifteen years later. We meet Agnes as a mother and we meet Hamnet, as he desperately tries to find help for ill twin sister. A dual timeline works really well for this novel and it helps create a superb portrait of how marriage and motherhood can change over time.

The writing is stunning. Absolutely stunning. About half way through something happens and you are left bereft, your heart shredded and that’s down to the power of Maggie O’Farrell’s words. Every single line is a work of art and many passages I re-read because they were so exquisite. I can go on and on about how beautiful it is, all I can do is implore you read it. It will blow you away.

This is the story of Hamnet, the son of Shakespeare who died aged 11 and (probably) provided inspiration for the play Hamlet. It mainly focuses on Shakespeare's wife (and Hamnet's mother) Agnes, who in this book is a healer with an element of magic which personally I liked as I love a bit of magical realism. I really really enjoyed this, I'd been looking forward to reading it and it didn't disappoint. It definitely takes more of a literary take than a historical one so anyone looking for a heavy historical read will be disappointed. I found it an engaging albeit heartbreaking read. It is also interesting how it doesn't seem to be common knowledge that the death of Shakespeare's young son inspired one of his greatest tragedies and I like that this book brings attention to this. However, it does do this with great subtlety as Shakespeare himself is never named - always being referred to as the father, the husband, etc. One I will be recommending.

All amazing feat of writing- I felt like I was there. Maggie O'Farrell makes the Tudor family life feel as vibrant and realistic as any book set today, with amazing historical research and a clever weaving of the known facts of Shakespeare's family life. I loved the sections about them falling in love, against their parents wills, and Agnes' family history. Fascinating and thoroughly recommended. You don't need any knowledge of Shakespeare to enjoy it.

This is a remarkable book. It is rare that I am moved to tears by reading and is testament to O’Farrells writing prowess that I was here, especially as readers come to the book knowing Hamnet’s fate. The way she weaves the story of this boy and his family is spellbinding, her writing evocative and a reminder to all of the beauty of prose. I loved every page and cannot wait to read it again.

Please note that this book is not for me - I have read the book, However I had to DNF and because i do not like to give negative reviews I will not review this book fully - there is no specific reason for not liking this book. I found it a struggle to read and did not enjoy trying to force myself to read this book.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused and thank you for the opportunity to read this book

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is a historical novel about Shakespeare’s family. I found the writing style a bit flat.

This book by Maggie O’Farrell tells the story of William Shakespeare’s wife and family. I was drawn to this book firstly by the beautiful cover and really wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. Well I has nothing to fear as if was simply wonderful. The whole story was so interesting and I just engaged with it from the very start. A massive five star read for me.