Sep 7

Sep 7 Hamnet

Author: Maggie O’Farrell
Publisher: Knopf (US Edition)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A thrilling departure: A short, piercing, deeply moving new novel from the acclaimed author of I Am, I Am, I Am, about the death of Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son Hamnet — a name interchangeable with Hamlet in fifteenth-century Britain — and the years leading up to the production of his great play.

England, 1580. A young Latin tutor — penniless, bullied by a violent father — falls in love with an extraordinary, 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 with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when his beloved young son succumbs to bubonic plague.

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 is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers.

TL;DR Review

Hamnet — a historical imagining about the death of William Shakespeare’s son — is so incredibly good. So beautiful, so sad, so impressive.

For you if: You like emotional, character-driven books, and especially if you like retellings.

Full Review

“The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Agnes will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.”

You know that feeling when you fully expect to love a book, and then you’re still blown away by how much you love it? Yeah, that’s what happened for me with Hamnet. Reading the words on these pages was a true pleasure; there’s no other way to describe it. But it was also so beautifully sad.

The true, historical fact: Back in the 1400s, “Hamlet” and “Hamnet” were interchangeable; the same name. William Shakespeare and his wife had a son named Hamnet who died when he was still a child. Years later, Shakespeare wrote the play. That’s what we know, and Maggie O’Farrell takes it from there.

The first two-thirds of the novel flip back and forth in time, from the “present,” as Hamnet falls ill from the plague, and the past, as William and Agnes meet, fall in love, marry, and bear children. Part one ends with Hamnet’s death, and part two is wholly about grief, and the world continuing to turn.

The true feat of this novel is the character of Agnes. She almost dips into the realm of witchiness, with the ability to know things that will happen in the future and see into people’s innermost self by feeling the muscle between their thumb and pointer finger. She’s an herbalist, and a person most at home in the forest. As a character, she’s larger than life; she’s wholly unique; she’s sharply emotional; she carries us. She’s also the absolute rock in William Shakespeare’s life, and the romance O’Farrell spins between them is intense, sweeping, tested, and true. And her grief is round, complete, devastating.

The way O’Farrell dives and swoops between perspectives, zooms into a character’s heart and out to the 10,000-foot view, is breathtaking. And her ability to allude to something, to cause you to intuit her meaning, so perfectly without saying it outright — you have to read it to believe it. This is the kind of storytelling that writers dream of.

I never wanted this book to end. I could have let myself be buffeted along by Maggie O’Farrell’s pen for hundreds more pages. Truly stunning.