Quietly observant, Hamnet creeps up on you, not with bells and whistles blowing, but with a considered and intimate view of life in Stratford upon Avon in the middle of the sixteenth century. We know that we are living with William Shakespeare's family in their home on Henley Street. We hear the clatter of pots and pans in the cook house, we notice John Shakespeare's quick temper and even quicker fist, we wear our white aprons alongside William's mother, Mary, as she encourages her listless maid to stir the cooking pot, and we also climb the stairs with William's son, Hamnet as he discovers that the twin of his heart is mortally sick with a deadly disease.

I've read many historical fiction novels set during the time of the pestilence but I have never experienced so vivid an account of how the deadly flea hopped here and there on its fatal journey to Stratford upon Avon in 1596, or the heartbreaking task of a mother saying goodbye to her beloved child. Usually portrayed as something of a shadowy figure, always on the periphery of her more famous husband, Agnes is brought to life in a startlingly beautiful way, and this is very much her life, her story, her sadness. More than slightly fey, and with one foot always placed in another world that only she can see, Agnes looks to plants and nature, being more comfortable outside than sharing the house on Henley Street with her in-laws. And whilst she can fly a Kestrel, make a healing potion and see visions of the future, she cannot save her child. Her grief is palpable and her all consuming sadness is beyond anything she has experienced in any of her visions.

In all ways that count Hamnet is very much about the sadness of grief, the hopelessness of loss. It's about the poetry of a wordsmith who, taking his inspiration from his observations of the intricacies of life, is left bereft by grief, and of a mother and a sister who are diluted by loss.

With a breathtaking intimacy, Hamnet broke my heart into a million pieces whilst at the same time I was fully immersed in this place, with these people who came to mean so much. The authenticity of the author's writing is without question, beautifully written and delicately stage managed, there is a poignant lyricism to the language, sometimes sparse, sometimes languid, sometimes brutal in its honesty, but always compelling in its reach to draw the reader into its very heart and soul.

Hamnet, is the alternative version of the spelling Hamlet. Hamlet leads to the playwright William Shakespeare and Shakespeare leads back to the town of Stratford in Warwickshire in the 16th century. O’Farrell has taken the known facts about Shakespeare and his family, the more recent historical explorations and suggestions (that underlie a lot of the myths) and created her own tale of the life of Hamnet, son of William Shakespeare, and his family. A key character will be his mother Agnes (Anne) Hathaway. She was born nearby, but with the early death of her mother she was raised in a large family of half siblings by her step-mother. Her younger full brother Bartholomew will inherit the family farm. Agnes, like her mother before, is in this novel depicted as deeply embedded in country life, fey or strange, with second sight and an interest in healing. In her twenties, still unmarried, she ended up pregnant by the teenage Will. They marry; have a daughter Susannah and later twins, Hamnet and Judith. She will have to move to the town of Stratford to live with her husband’s family.
In this deceptively slight novel, following history, Will Shakespeare will head off to London to eventually work in the theatre and gain connections, wealth and a satisfactory life away from his family. Agnes will continue to live in the town of Stratford close to her in-laws. Her father in law (it is known) had been a closet Catholic, but additionally had fallen from power in the town after allegations of illegal trading. O’Farrell portrays him as a discontented and violent man – a household tyrant. With Will away Agnes will have to negotiate the family tensions and run her own household single handed with all its work and tribulations, while rarely seeing her husband. She will need to build a reputation and livelihood for her children in a small town where the Shakespeare name meant unreliability and disgrace.
It is probably known by readers that in the medieval period disease was rife and life could be short. Hamnet will die young. It is suggested here that Shakespeare’s grief on the loss of his only son bleeds into the play Hamlet and its characters. But of course this novel turns the current Shakespeare trope on its head. He might be internationally famous now, but in this tale he is largely present by his absence. The rest of his family are the characters and their actions are the weft of this tale. We have not just a deft picture of medieval life with its daily routines and more occasional crises. But O’Farrell has manage to create the feeling and ambience of the landscape both rural and townscape. This is something that those who have spent time in the places depicted will recognise. But additionally she has also managed to take the reader to the mindset of contentment that Agnes had in her life away from people and interacting with beasts and the landscape – a truly impressive achievement. But we also get the overwhelming grief too, the anxieties and then annoyance it raises in others around her and the hints of the long term damage this will cause to her family life.
Focusing on the realities of the day to day family so closely means that this novel is about more than the 16th century. It speaks to people, everywhere, of all times. Ironic then that it should reach publication as the pandemic affects us all and the combination of increased risk and absent family members are so relevant. But this is an extremely fine and assured novel – quiet, thoughtful and imbued with thoughts as to what is truly important at both a physical and emotional level. It comes highly recommended as a read. Whether the “Warwickshire” setting means anything to you or not, it is undoubtedly a bonus for those it does.

O’Farrell’s book contains evocative descriptions that drew me in and told the story of a woman whom history didn’t care to note. This book is an achingly beautiful story of love and loss, hope and grief, failure and redemption. It’s truly one of the most poignant novels I’ve read in a long time.

This book is not so much about Shakespeare as it is about his wife and his twin children, Hamnet and Judith. Although it culminates with his masterpiece, Hamlet, he is not present for most of the book and, really, that is almost the point. He is never even referred to by name but by his relationship to others – father, son, tutor, husband. The children are back in Stratford with their mother (Agnes – I know she is usually known as Anne but she was named as Agnes in her father’s will) while Will himself is away so he would always be less physically present in the story but, like so many parents who need to be distant for work, personal or health needs, he is felt in the emotional response to his absence. So many relationships are explored beyond just that between Shakespeare, his wife and their children – it is the strain between the playwright and his father which is pivotal in his departure to London – but the most interesting to me are any which involve Agnes. She is shown as a child of the forest and nature and, therefore, an object of suspicion to many including her own step-mother. She is a dedicated wife, mother and sister and shown to be vastly more three-dimensional than the minimal historical evidence shows.

This book is a fascinating read with wonderful characters. The complex family relationships make each of them into real people – I could feel their pain and joy – and Agnes’ particular history, a blend of herbalism and passion, was pivotal. The twins were interesting too – two children with very different personalities but with an incredible bond which, well……that would be telling…

Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' famously contains a play within a play, 'The Murder of Gonzago', which Hamlet uses it to provoke a reaction from his uncle. Very similarly, 'Hamnet' by Maggie O'Farrell feels like a story within a story, where she uses the renowned playwright and his most famous play to give the reader the context they need for this story of love, grief and fate set against the backdrop of plague ridden 1500s England. What I thought would be a simple retelling of Shakespeare's life around the time he wrote 'Hamlet', named after his son Hamnet who died as a child, is a far stranger and more beautiful novel than I anticipated.


The book begins with Hamnet Shakespeare racing around his village looking for his mother, or any of his family members to help his twin sister Judith, who has suddenly fallen ill with what is quite apparently the plague. This ever increasingly desperate search, full of dread as the reader comes to realise something terrible is going to happen, is told alongside flashbacks as to how his parents met.


Shakespeare himself is not named in the novel; rather we meet a young ambitious latin teacher as he falls in love with Agnes, his students' older sister. Agnes with her affinity with animals animals and odd, almost magic seeming intuition quickly becomes the more interesting of the pair. Her mother's tragic death and her father quickly remarrying a horrible, greedy woman called Joan mean that when she becomes pregnant with Shakespeare's child, his abusive father's small house is the only place she is welcome.

Shakespeare goes to London after his first child is born to sell gloves to a theatre as part of his father's business, but he quickly becomes enraptured with the the theatre and what he finds in himself there and comes home to his family less and less. However, the usual story of the genius who became one of the world's greatest playwrights is instead told in a more universal and perhaps truthful way: a young family is left behind and is left to fend for themselves and try to grieve for a lost child and an absent husband and father.

The man behind the work is a story more often told than the neglected family behind the man, but one I certainly want to see more of. Agnes is fierce in her love for her husband and her family, and offers a less passive voice to the Anne we have heard of in the past. Her communication with nature, her intuition and her gift for healing doesn't come as a surprise to the reader considering many of the women in Shakespearean plays, and was such an interesting track for O'Farrell to have taken with this character.

This was a strange time for this novel to be released, in the middle of a pandemic, as the plague haunts the novel throughout, how quickly it creeps up on characters and how it can resurge at any moment. However, it was in its way uplifting: the world has faced horrible, destructive illnesses before, and the world has survived.

O'Farrell's 'Hamnet' is angry, lyrical and bewitching novel that gives life to an old story and reclaims the women and the families that are too often left in the shadows of celebrated men.

Hamlet is my favourite Shakespeare play. It is about revenge, justice, madness and procrastination with a hint of the supernatural. So when I learned that 'Hamlet' is also written as 'Hamnet' , I was intrigued. The real person who inspired the play, perhaps.

A beautifully written book, with a narrative slightly elevated in keeping with a sense of the Tudor period, not so much as to make it archaic, but modern enough to make it accessible and timeless. The prologue explains that Hamnet is William Shakespeare's young son although Shakespeare himself is never named being referred to as the husband, father or the Latin Tutor, as if naming him is taboo.

The story starts with the boy Hamnet looking for an adult to help his twin sister who has suddenly fallen ill. Here we see the description of the family house and the grandfather's trade of glove making. Then it flips to time out with the father who-shall-be-not-named, then to when Hamnet's parents meet and the hostility their relationship brings within the families. Then back to the point of view of the sick girl, then back to Hamnet.

The past is written in the present tense with reported speech. There are poetic similes and an intimate scene expressed via the medium of apples. A wonderfully original scene too. Although the boy Hamnet holds the title of the this tale, it it really about his mother - how she met her husband, how she deals with her unconformity, her family, marriage, life and death. Hamnet's purpose for the story becomes apparent towards the end in a moving and powerful way.

Evocative and at times heartbreaking, O'Farrell's book is competing with Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light for literary awards in 2020. Disappointing to see that the distinctive style of Mantel is occasionally copied: 'She, Agnes...' and 'He, Hamnet...' as if this little quirk is the benchmark of higher creativity. Not needed. This book stands alone without such gestures.

Shakespeare's play bears no resemblance to his son or his life, but O'Farrell forges a poignant and lasting thread in this novel. The story grows from an interesting tale to a magnificent and elaborate crescendo of language covering every corner of the pain of life and death. Highly recommended.

This is the story of Hamnet Shakespeare's son. Maggie O' Farrell has ventured back into Tudor times for a novel in which Shakespeare isn't the main character and is often in the wings. In fact, O' Farrell refers to him obliquely. If I'm right, his first name isn't mentioned or even his surname.

O 'Farrell takes the few known facts about the family and weaves her own story from these bare threads. Centre stage is Agnes (usually known as Anne Hathaway) .
However, O’ Farrell begins with a long cinematic type chapter following Hamnet through Stratford as he searches for his mother. You can imagine this all in one shot on a screen. I wasn't drawn in initially, but once Agnes appeared then the book took off for me. Her story reflects the fairy tale motif of the wild wood. Agnes’ mother came from the forest and Agnes herself develops into a wise woman who has a sort of second sight. When she touches Shakespeare’s hand she senses worlds within him. She is also able to use herbs for medicine, but will this knowledge save her loved ones from the pestilence?
Of course, there are resonances with the present Covid situation that O'Farrell didn't plan.

O' Farrell wrote a non- fiction book called I Am, I Am , I Am about brushes with death. Also her daughter has a health condition. Whether you believe that you can relate an author's life to a book or not, the account of Hamnet's illness is very raw and truthful and powerful.

I was very moved with the description of Hamnet’s death as in some ways it paralleled my own experience of being at a deathbed.
“Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more”
Of course, this is just the beginning of the grief which divides the family and sends them spinning in opposite directions.

The heart- breaking, unimaginable loss of a child is portrayed with aching psychological insight. Such grief transcends divisions of time. Agnes encounters the same experiences as modern day parents who have lost a child

“That people don’t always know what to say to a woman whose child has died. That some will cross the street to avoid her merely because of this”

It’s not just the dead Hamnet who is being grieved for but the future he should have had
“here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him”
His twin asks
“What is the word, Judith asks her mother for someone who was a twin, but is no longer a twin/”

The story culminates in Agnes rushing to London to see the play “Hamlet” and place it in her grief and understand how her husband could write such a play.

I think this is worthy of its place on the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist. It deserves many accolades. I was very moved by it.

I'm skeptical of novels that follow famous characters as they usually feel like a gimmick but I soon got over that once I was immersed in Maggie O'Farrell's beautiful writing. She captures the resounding joy and agonising turmoil of parenthood with such beauty, as well as the wonder of childhood, and the mysticism of nature so perfectly. I loved the character of Agnes, depicted as a loner devoted to her absent husband and to nature, and so enjoyed their love story and the family politics at the centre of the story. Hamnet is a very moving novel that didn't need Shakespeare at its heart as it stood so surely on its own. A beautiful story about family, grief and nature.

There has been so much hype about this book, especially since it was short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and I was a little nervous to read it in case I didn’t enjoy it! I should not have worried as it really is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.
I love Maggie O’Farrell, I can still vividly recall her first book After You’d Gone and just being so impressed with the way she uses language and captures emotions. Hamnet is her first foray into historical fiction but O’Farrell’s distinctive style still shines through.

Hamnet is based on the family life of William Shakespeare in the 16th Century although he is not named at any point. There is very little information known about his wife, Agnes or Anne as she is recorded. Yet Maggie O’Farrell brings her to life within her story and she is possibly more interesting than the Bard himself. Agnes was a farmer’s daughter, older than Shakespeare and they married when she was already with child. She bore a daughter, Susannah first and then twins, Judith and Hamnet. Agnes can see how stifled and frustrated her husband is in the family glove making business in Stratford and it is she who encourages him to go to London to pursue his own dreams. Agnes stays with the children in Stratford caring for them and the community where she is well known for her herbal remedies and ability to see the future.

Tragedy strikes when the plague comes into their household, Judith falls ill and her twin Hamnet spends most of the day looking for somebody to help his precious sister. Once he has the adults attention they are focused on saving Judith and do not notice that Hamnet is unwell too. Judith rallies but Hamnet is lost, his father doesn’t get home in time to say goodbye. The family are ripped apart with grief, each of them experiencing it in a different way. Life does not ever return to normal and they have to find a way of living with their loss and coming together rather than pushing each other away. Shakespeare’s great tragedy Hamlet was borne from the loss of his son and I now see it in a very different way, it is actually a declaration of love for the son that was taken from him,

I took my time with this book and re-read parts several times as Maggie O’Farrell’s way with words is just stunning. There is a description of how the plague came to be and I have no idea how she did it but her description of fleas jumping from cat to person and so on was mesmerising. I think it was incredibly clever how she showed how grief and loss knows no bounds, it can touch anyone’s life. It doesn’t matter that this is the greatest playwright who has ever lived; this book is about grief and love and loss. Having had the terrible experience of friends losing a child, I was very impressed with how O’Farrell explored how grief can affect a family unit. I can remember how our friends went through so many stages and sometimes were even angry and resentful when one had moved to a different stage and the other hadn’t. Agnes and her husband are living with their own grief but they also have to accept that their other two children are grieving for the sibling they lost too. The passages which describe how they are both feeling after Hamnet’s death made me cry, they are brutally honest and the feelings of loss and desperation took my breath away.

Hamnet is stunning and it is a book that I will return to many times. Maggie O’Farrell uses historical fact to tell a moving story of love and loss.

The story of how Shakespeare's Hamlet was made. A beautiful tale of how Shakespeare met his wife and had 3 children, when his son Hamnet died the whole family finds it hard to go on. It shows the individual ways in which the family grieves. A well written and heart wrenching story.

As one of my very favourite authors I knew I would like this book before I started it. This is her first foray into history and it is a fascinating tale based on William Shakespeare's family, although he is not named. This is more the tale of his wife, three children and the surrounding family and the tragic death of his son. The life they lead in Stratford is a fascinating portrayal of their home life and the relationships and aggravation between the extended families. This is one of those books that should not be skimmed but each word read and digested. Fascinating and compelling. Maggie O'Farrell never disappoints.
Many thanks to Netgalley/Maggie O'Farrell/Headline for a digital copy of this title. All opinions expressed are my own.

Wow! This book feels like an instant classic. It explores utterly timeless subjects such as love, family and grief, making issues that affected Shakespeare's family in the 16th century just as relevant to readers today.

I happen to love historical novels and Shakespeare, but I truly believe this will also appeal to readers who don't typically read this genre. William Shakespeare is never actually named and much of the story is related through the highly-relatable Agnes, his wife. Maggie O'Farrell's historical research was clearly extensive, but the novel wears it lightly and it never seems 'showy' or too much - it is entirely appropriate and the novel's world is brought to life from the off, with urgency and immediacy, in vivid technicolour.

I particularly enjoyed the insightful description of the family dynamics and how grief affects each one of us in different ways. There is also a spiritual, supernatural element woven through the novel which felt entirely in keeping and reminded me a little of parts of Max Porter's wonderful book, 'Lanny'.

A wonderful novel which deals with the most important aspects of our humanity. Thank you so much to Headline and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a free advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a great book from an author who continues to prove that whichever tale she turns her hand to, she can delight, enthuse and cause the reader to think. I truly loved it.

As someone who has spent 3 years studying Shakespeare's life, times & plays closely I was a little nervous of this book - so many details in films & other works are jarringly anachronistic- but for me Hamnet escaped these pitfalls.
While obviously all of the details were filled in by O'Farrell in refusing to engage with the authorship & faith debates a rounded world of the late 1500s was created and I could taste & smell Hamnet's world.
Hamlet the play is never going to one of my favourites but looking at it through Agnes' eyes may give me a new take.
Not 100% sure that reading a book set in the plague years was a great choice during our current pandemic but that's just a personal view!

Maggie O'Farrell is one of my favourite authors - someone who's latest book I would always actively seek out.  I was delighted, therefore, to be granted access to a review copy of her new book, Hamnet, on NetGalley.  What a wonderful read this is.

From the blurb:

Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright. It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage pushed to the brink by grief. It is also the story of a kestrel and its mistress; a flea that boards a ship in Alexandria; and a glovemaker's son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. Above all, it is a tender and unforgettable reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

I always enjoy books which explore the lives of famous people or well-known events from an unexpected perspective.  The genius of O'Farrell's text is that it makes a virtue of 'the elephant in the room'.  William Shakespeare is not named once in the book - in fact we experience his character as almost incidental to the main story, which focuses principally on his wife Agnes, how her life is affected by her marriage into the Shakespeare family, and how she is affected by the fate of her children, most particularly her son Hamnet.

It is easy to see how Shakespeare himself as a character could have totally dwarfed the narrative, thus eclipsing O'Farrell's purpose in writing the novel, namely to give agency to the other people in his life.  In Agnes' case, we have even got her name wrong over the years.  Most of us would think of Shakespeare's wife as being called Anne.  But apparently her father cited her as Agnes in his will and, as I have heard O'Farrell say in interviews recently, he should know the name of his own daughter.

The reading of this story is enhanced by the depth and beauty of O'Farrell's approach to her text.  It reads like historical fiction meets nature writing:

"She brings a honeycomb out of the skep and squats to examine it. Its surface is covered, teeming, with something that appears to be one moving entity: brown, banded with gold, wings shaped like tiny hearts. It is hundreds of bees, crowded together, clinging to their comb, their prize, their work. She lifts a bundle of smouldering rosemary and waves it gently over the comb, the smoke leaving a trail in the still August air. The bees lift, in unison, to swarm above her head, a cloud with no edges, an airborne net that keeps casting and casting itself. The pale wax is scraped, carefully, carefully, into a basket; the honey leaves the comb with a cautious, near reluctant drop. Slow as sap, orange-gold, scented with the sharp tang of thyme and the floral sweetness of lavender, it falls into the pot Agnes holds out. A thread of honey stretches from comb to pot, widening, twisting."


This is a book to wallow in.  But beware - total immersion makes it all the more unbearable to experience with Agnes the tragedy that befalls the family.  You know what is coming, and yet the power of the narrative pulls you along, helpless to spare yourself from being affected by the family's grief, the cause of which is attributed by O'Farrell to the Plague.  This brings an inadvertently prescient tone to the book.  The chapter describing the journey of a flea from the Mediterranean to Stratford is particularly compelling and is of course an all too real parallel with the world in which we currently find ourselves.  Art imitating life writ large.

I did wonder before starting this book whether I would be at a disadvantage, as I am not particularly knowledgeable about the detail of Shakespeare's plays.  Would I miss lots of clever references?  I needn't have worried.  This is simply a stunning imagined fiction about a famous family, the members of whom have not, until now, had the kind of exposure they deserve.  Highly recommended.



With grateful thanks to publisher Tinder Press for a review copy via NetGalley.

Maggie O'Farrell deeply understands humanity, passion, grief, and how a writer's life comes through their work - surely in Hamnet she has got to the truth of Shakespeare and his family, which we had thought was unknowable. This is the first book that has kept me awake into the night - it is sure to be my book of the year. Unmissable.

*WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS ONE. SORRY BUT I JUST COULDN’T HELP GUSHING ABOUT IT*

As soon as I heard about Hamnet I wanted to read it. As someone who has loved Shakespeare’s plays since childhood just hearing that I could read a story written about the writer and his son sparked my excitement. So many people were talking about how good it was online. I sent out emails and tweets trying to get my hands on a proof copy and finally I got an e-book copy just a short time before publication… and I didn’t read it.

I was scared that I wouldn’t love it like so many reviewers already had. I felt this weight of everyone else’s love for this novel pushing against my back. Twitter was whispering “read it, just read it”, but I was worried that I was going to be that one person who hated it.

Then one not so special day in lockdown, I curled myself up on the sofa and started to read. Never, since back when I first read The Handmaid’s Tale at 16, have I felt so stained by a book. The character’s inky fingerprints pressed in to my heart and chest as I read through the story. The world I was reading started sticking to me like mud splashed up from the mucky Stratford pastoral landscape. It is so easy to think that this is a book written to tell the story of Shakespeare losing his son but in truth it is much more than that.

Hamnet tells the story of a woman, husband and their children. Agnes is the name that we come to know the playwright’s wife by and not the one history popularises. Maggie O’Farrell used the name that Anne Hathaway’s father used for her in his will. Surely her father would have given the name his daughter was known by.

We follow Agnes life growing up on the farm at the hands of a cruel step mother and an ambivalent father. Despite losing her biological mother at a young age she takes on so much of who she once was. She is a child of the earth and there is something almost of the witch about her. She meets a young Latin teacher who suffers at the fists of his abusive father. They fall in love much to their families’ mutual surprise. They start a life together. Their own family grows. Three children bless their home; Suzanne, Hamnet and Judith. As her husband pursues his dreams far away, Agnes knows she has built a happy home. However, all this is shattered when the shadow of death comes for her children. Their family life splinters and their existence is forever blotted by an unhappy mark.

It is in the telling of Agnes’ life that you learn to love her. She is a daughter who has seen and suffered so much yet stays true to her mother’s memory. She is the lover of a tortured artist who is beckoned by his creative demons to a big city that she will never live in. Agnes is her village’s cunning woman. She tends the sick with her mysterious understanding of herbs and the wild earth. She has strange ways that the town gossips about but still in some weird way also earns her some sort of respect. She is a mother who nurses, cares for, worries about, cheers for, inspires and embarrasses her children.

Maggie O’Farrell writes the challenge of womanhood in a way that is so vivid it gives the writing a tangible quality. You could almost brush your fingers across the callouses on Agnes’ hands as you reach out your own to reassure her at times. You want to usher away the people clamouring to interfere as she plunges in to childbirth. As a human being you know the pain of being powerless to help others who are struggling or suffering. We have all experienced that heartache of not being able to stand up for someone we feel isn’t being heard. As I read this book that was the emotion that was building itself in my chest. I wanted some sort of justice for what O’Farrell was putting this woman through.

However, it is not just Agnes’ heartache that you experience. You view the world from other character’s points of view. You get to see how incredible she is to her husband and his own disappointment in himself for feeling he is not good enough for her. O’Farrell lets you experience her mother-in-law and eldest daughter’s embarrassment in Agnes’ simple country ways from their perspective as civilized towns women. You see how her stepmother Joan sees her as manipulative and a weird wild thing. Then you get to see her through the eyes of her loving young twins, Judith and Hamnet. O’Farrell doesn’t so much paint a picture of Agnes but constructs a sculpture that is a tribute to the constantly shifting perception of a woman’s worth.

It is hard not to read this novel and wonder if little bits and pieces are placed throughout it as to hint to what might have inspired Shakespeare’s plays. Did the way he met his wife inspire his love stories? Were the witches inspired by his wife’s knowledge of the natural world or her supernatural aura? What inspired the tragedies? His legacy is as much a spectre to the text as it is for his family to live with by the end of the novel.

The heart of the novel is the death of Hamnet. The story revolves around the moment that he is taken by the plague. The past of the characters build to it and the rest of the story that follows his passing is riddled with the cracks it causes. Grief seeps through the pages and in to the reader veins. You feel it rage like some long expected storm and then endure it ebbing away painfully slowly as the life of the family carries on.

There were two parts of the novel that I absolutely adored reading. The first was the birth of the twins. Just like the birth in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale the beauty of the moment is the feral humanity of it. The scene evokes a real visceral and emotional experience that I can’t stop thinking about. The second part was the journey of the flea from Alexandria to Stratford. I’m not usually a fan of having to know where the essence of evil comes from as it can feel bulky and unnatural but I loved this. The story of the flea’s adventure was almost silently insidious. It was beautiful.

For me reading this story now with the world I am living in was hard. When each night the news broadcasts are filled with stories of people losing loved ones it makes the death of Hamnet so very difficult to read. We all learn about the plague as children. Anyone who has ever enjoyed Shakespeare will know that the play houses were closed to stop it from spreading. You can’t help but compare then to now and worry about the loss of life or the suffering that is now going on throughout the world. It was so weird to think that one of the places I often walk out to as the weather becomes warmer is The Globe. I grab a take away drink and take a seat near the Thames to read a few pages of my book before I wander home. This is something a global pandemic is now stopping me from doing. It is all so surreal to read about it in the pages of a work of fiction based in a period of history that seems so long ago.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is a fantastic fictitious account of a family who experience the loss of a child. It is a masterpiece and I predict it will be a future literary classic.

Hamnet is a tour de force of storytelling. Maggie O’Farrell’s words dance off the page and transport you to Shakespeare’s family and Stratford. Hamnet is a tale of loss, love, betrayal and it actual broke my heart.
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Very little is know about Shakespeare’ wife Anne Hathaway, or Agnes as she is called in this tale. Many have portrayed her as trapping him in marriage, not being very intelligent and being confined to history as just his wife, nothing special. O’Farrell has tried to rectify this by creating a narrative where Agnes is the beating heart of the family, highly intelligent (albeit semi-illiterate), a great mother and at one with nature. She now has a voice in history.
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Hamnet and Judith their twins and the book opens with Judith presenting with pestilence and there is no one home to help out. Hamnet tries all he can to alert an adult but a whole afternoon passes without getting assistance from anyone.
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What follows is a dual timeline - events which occurred with William and Agnes met and the consequences of the pestilence’s presence in the household. I loved how William was actually an insignificant character in this tale. It was the women who shone and Agnes in particular. There was an air of mystery about her and I adored her as a character.
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These events obviously have inspired Hamlet and I do want to reread the play. I would be looking at it from a very different perspective now.
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This book was beautiful. It’s story sparkled. It may have been sorrowful in places but at its heart is beautiful and centres around a parent’s love for their children.

An utterly captivating historical fiction read which is better than the hype. The writing, the emotion and the stories are perfect. This is a story about a woman and her family, not about the world's most famous playwright. This a book about a mother, about mourning, about standing out of the crowd and of being, above all else, devoted to family

Maggie O’Farrell tells the story of what could be William Shakespeare’s family, anchored on the death of one of their children. The novel is titled Hamnet, the connection to one of Shakespeare's best-known (but perhaps not best-loved) plays obvious, and also the name of his only son.

The clean and unaffected prose both makes the story a lot more readable than you’d perhaps expect a book about Shakespeare to be, and it shows the relationship Shakespeare has to his children and wife in a light that’s far more tender than I think a lot of other writers give him credit for. A part of this magic comes from O’Farrell’s focus on his wife, who she has christened Agnes, over Shakespeare himself – he is never named in the book, and becomes almost a secondary character.

Throughout all this, you hold your breath for one of the children to die from the very first page. The overlayering of story lines is exquisitely done, casting back to how Shakespeare and his wife met, how they fell in love and the trials they faced internally and externally to both build the life and family they wanted, while their son Hamnet looks for help on the afternoon his twin sister Judith takes sick with the plague.

This story is not about Shakespeare, and it’s not about his wife, and it’s not about any one of their children in particular. It's about the lives of a family, and how they have been converted by the absence of one of their own. This makes it almost impossible to read this book in Spring 2020 and not see the story as a timely and painful reminder of the current virus outbreak claiming children's lives and how the lockdown is keeping us apart from those we love most even as we grieve. I think that’s going to be one reason why this book is going to be remembered by many of those who pick it up this year.

With a slant to the mythological, the fiction between the facts we know about the Bard’s life, Hamnet differs from most other accounts – fictional or fictionalised – of Shakespeare’s life I’ve encountered in recent years. As such, I feel this book is probably most enjoyable if you are a Shakespeare enthusiast, not a scholar.

[spoiler below]

I very much fall into the category of the former, but what I would have hoped for in this telling above all else, was still an interpretation of how Hamnet's death transformed and informed Shakespeare's work, and a suggestion on how writing the tragedy of Hamlet helped him cope. It’s cleverly done to have the play experienced through his wife's eyes instead, with an emotional depth that perhaps Shakespeare’s view himself would have lacked, but I missed his view.