Thank you so much for granting my wish! I have been desperate to read this for so long and it did not disappoint. I think I'll have to write a more in-depth review soon once I've processed my thoughts properly!

Why Shakespeare? In Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet” the author uses her considerable talent for mapping the emotional terrain and intimate relationships of her contemporary characters over a long period of time to write a historical novel about the plague-ridden reality of late 16th century England and the death of Shakespeare’s adolescent son Hamnet. Four years after the boy’s death the Bard wrote ‘Hamlet’, a name that was used interchangeably with Hamnet at the time. Given we know only a slender amount about Shakespeare’s life and he wrote nothing of his personal grief, it’s irresistible to speculate on what motivated him to immortalize his son’s name in a play which went on to be one of the most quoted literary works in the English language. However, rather than portray Shakespeare’s thoughts and feelings, O’Farrell instead focuses on the lives of his family: Shakespeare and Agnes’ hastily arranged marriage, the illness of Hamnet’s twin sister Judith, Hamnet’s sudden death and the devastating grief which followed. This is powerfully rendered, beautifully written with evocative historical details and I enjoyed it immensely but…

I felt like something was lacking. A problem might be in my expectations for this novel which has been much-hyped and lauded. It’s been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, tipped for the Booker and a prominent review ended by simply stating “this is a work that ought to win prizes.” Publicity for the book describes it as “the heart-stopping story behind Shakespeare’s most famous play.” But the novel tells us very little about Shakespeare’s motivation or influence for writing the play beyond what I’ve already described. So I feel that if O’Farrell uses this as a premise her fiction needs to converse with and expand our understanding of Shakespeare’s writing and his literary stature by imaginatively inhabiting his reality. However, Shakespeare is very much a periphery character who is emotionally and physically absent from his family in Stratford while he pursues his dramatic work in London. Of course, this was no doubt the reality. But if we’re not going to get Shakespeare’s perspective or a feeling for the man himself why include him as a character or focus on this central storyline?

Instead, O’Farrell inventively and movingly imagines the life of Agnes as someone with healing powers and quasi-psychic abilities who frequently gathers flowers and herbs to concoct healing mixtures for many of the locals. It’s remarked that “Agnes is of another world. She does not quite belong here.” She’s an entirely-convincing, fully rounded character who is strong and full of heart. I found it very touching how she’s hampered with feelings of guilt about her son’s fate even though she couldn’t have predicted the outcome of his illness or prevented his death. Also, her ambivalent feelings about her husband are a poignant and realistic depiction of a relationship. She’ll never want to see him again one moment and then another moment will feel achingly close to him. She also recognizes that his family and life in Stratford could never be enough for him: “She can tell, even through her dazed exhaustion, even before she can take his hand, that he has found it, he is fitting it, he is inhabiting it - that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do.” All of this detail and characterization is excellent but it could be about any family with an absent husband/father.

Shakespeare looms large in our esteem as probably the greatest writer in Western literature and there’s a prolific amount of biographical literature based on relatively few facts making the Bard seem more mythical than historical. Therefore, O’Farrell’s novel feels somewhat like fanfiction that imaginatively and powerfully builds a domestic universe out of the slenderly-known central players in his life. It makes an important statement by naming these figures and conspicuously not naming Shakespeare at all in the novel – he’s only ever referred to by his status as either “the husband”, “the tutor” or “the father”. Perhaps it is partly O’Farrell’s purpose in writing this book to state that the man was merely mortal and his reality was probably as ordinary as his stark and plain writing room that we get a glimpse of late in the novel. That’s perfectly fine. But…

While reading this novel I kept thinking of “Lincoln in the Bardo” and how much Saunders dynamically builds on both our historical and imagined understanding of Abraham Lincoln as a legendary political figure from American history. As with any prominent figure, it shows how he had to balance his personal reality with his public reputation. But “Hamnet” shows us almost nothing about Shakespeare’s conflict except why he’s almost entirely absented himself from family life: “He sees how he may become mired in Stratford forever, a creature with its leg in the jaws of an iron trap, with his father next door, and his son, cold and decaying, beneath the churchyard sod.” But even before Hamnet’s death he rarely visited his family. A writer who feels like they can’t simultaneously maintain a family and professional life is an interesting subject, but his feelings on this aren’t explored either. The most moving portrait of Shakespeare in this novel comes when he tries to engage Agnes in talking about the flora she gathers rather than discussing their son’s death and Agnes resolutely ignores him. Otherwise, I was left as surprised and confused as Agnes about why Shakespeare named his play after his son – other than a fairly obvious psychological interpretation for his motivations. This left me feeling somewhat deflated at the end of the novel.

Given our current circumstances, I also have to note the bizarre coincidence that this novel focuses so much on the effects of a pandemic. It describes in detail the symptoms the plague has on the body and the way measures were taken to try to contain the illness. There are references to theatres needing to periodically close because of it. There’s also an imaginative and impressive section which describes the journey of the illness and how is spreads through fleas from a young sailor to a glass craftsman and how it finally comes to infect a member of Shakespeare’s family. It’s a strange experience reading a novel whose central subject matter becomes surprisingly topical. I also want to stress how much I enjoyed this excellent novel and I’m not surprised it has many enthusiastic fans, but I just wasn’t as impressed as some other readers have been.

I absolutely loved this book! I think a review might be superfluous after all the awards and accolades that have been given by other more illustrious reviewers, but I will add my standing ovation to theirs. It is a wonderfully inventive and beautifully imagined book about Shakespeare's everyday life. Although the man himself rarely appears, he is at the heart of everything. We mostly see the world through the eyes of his wife, Agnes, whose otherness is woven through the story to create a sense of ethereal mystery, and later, heartfelt misery on the death of the title character. It is unusually structured to move in and out of the events of the story seamlessly, but retains a stong narrative that engages and grips the reader. A masterful novel to rank alongside some of her other innovative work I have read.

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.