Name: Hamnet
ISBN: 9781472223791

Maggie O'Farrell

'Dazzling. Devastating' Kamila Shamsie 'Stunning... deserves to win prizes' Marian Keyes A stunning new departure for Maggie O'Farrell's fiction, HAMNET is the heart-stopping story behind Shakespeare's most famous play. On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week. 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; 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.

Hamnet

Ausrine Blazyte

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.

Liam Collins

Sarah Jackson

Mariam Abdel-Razek

ame 

caroline

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

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. 

Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as 'slipping away' or 'peaceful' has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.

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

If you were a wife, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if its parents die. a child becomes an orphan. But what is the word for what I am?

Laura Gill

The silence swells between them; it expands and wraps itself around them; it acquires shape and form and tendrils, which wave off into the air, like the threads trailing from a broken web. 

If he were a dog, his tail would be constantly wagging.

Oahu is a giant clam. She has been living inside a clamshell, able to see a chunk of the wide blue world past the edges and walking along porcelain veneers in the meanwhile. 

Bilge Ince

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.

Shore-ditch? Agnes had repeated. She pictured the bank of a river, silted, reed-frilled, a place where yellow flags might grow, and birds would nest, and then a ditch, a treacherously slippery sloped hole, with muddy water in the bottom. ‘Shore’ and then ‘ditch’.

She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes.

In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

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.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.
source: https://www.booksontape.com/book/612385/hamnet/

Swathi Ramaprasad

The language, the characters drew me in, as the storyline weaves this intricate forwards and back-telling of time pulling moments and meaning and feeling to be closely intertwined together. Moving! Timeless, whilst holding true a real sense of another time.

Beatrix

A simply beautiful ache donned in lyrical prose. Graceful, raw, and enchanting. I was bewitched by Agnes who became my source of fascination. I cherished the reverence she possessed to her own truth and the natural world. Death was met bare until it was whisked away to violet grey grief. I would just about read Maggie O’Farrell describe cement her writing is so wonderful, consuming of the life within things. 

Georgia Sky 🏹

here's where things get a little complicated for me.

The beginning of this novel, had me wondering whether I was the target audience to fall in love with this book. And then came these non linear stories one after the other. And then a flea comes by, and I ask myself, why am I still here, oh yes, I don't like to quit. So I slog on. And then Maggie writes about love, oh how wonderful.

And then, around the middle of this novel, you get reeled in. It doesn't stop. It's like you get caught up in a storm and you want out truly for you know how it ends and it ends badly but you want to see the end of it.

And then Maggie writes not only about love, but grief, the kind of grief one can understand only when they've lived it. The kind of grief that overcomes a soul to the point of no return. A mother who has lost a child and a part of her body, a father who years later, is still trying to find out a way to keep his memory alive.

Maggie knows how to write pain, and by the end I am left numb. So yeah. It's not a 5, and it's not a 4. It's not somewhere in between, and I wonder whether I'll revisit this again some day.

diya

here's where things get a little complicated for me.

The beginning of this novel, had me wondering whether I was the target audience to fall in love with this book. And then came these non linear stories one after the other. And then a flea comes by, and I ask myself, why am I still here, oh yes, I don't like to quit. So I slog on. And then Maggie writes about love, oh how wonderful.
And then, around the middle of this novel, you get reeled in. It doesn't stop. It's like you get caught up in a storm and you want out truly for you know how it ends and it ends badly but you want to see the end of it.

And then Maggie writes not only about love, but grief, the kind of grief one can understand only when they've lived it. The kind of grief that overcomes a soul to the point of no return. A mother who has lost a child and a part of her body, a father who years later, is still trying to find out a way to keep his memory alive.
Maggie knows how to write pain, and by the end I am left numb. So yeah. It's not a 5, and it's not a 4. It's not somewhere in between, and I wonder whether I'll revisit this again some day.



some points strictly for sentimentality — i was not completely immune to o'farrell's tugging of heartstrings. a (rather verbose) portrait of grief, love, and loss. but i enjoy my purple prose, and can probably tolerate it more than others. for myself i can say more about what didn't work in this than what did: while i did like agnes being this sort of elf, wood sprite, fae being, or anything adjacent, i'm not sure i fully warmed up to the idea, considering the kind of book this is. i wondered if this woman from history couldn't have just been... ordinary? or would that not be as interesting? or is imagining a woman as all-knowing and strange and eccentric and special the only way we can write these retellings? i'm not very sure. an appreciated consequence of this was how she described the world around her, which was an advantage in o'farrell's storytelling. it gave the air in this book a sort of magical realism... then again, i would've preferred a grounded approach, but i enjoyed the fantastical aspect. the non-naming of shakespeare was a bit odd. if it was an attempt to decenter him in this agnes-centric book, the sole absence of his name just gives him more focus because of the oddity. i assume people reading this would know it's about shakespeare anyway, not to mention the notes at the start of the book. there was also this continuous focus on his bruise by his abusive grandfather's hand that ultimately ended up as nothing... which is a shame because i was looking forward to it having more importance, as i also did for other parts of this book

shockingly, i cared. i don't know how i did, because frankly there is not much written of the characters' relationships. i maintain the fact that i would have liked more of the present and not the past; we spend so much time catching up to the present with hamnet until at the end all we have of him is his birth and death. but i did care, which i'm not sure if it speaks from my love of siblings (that i could reconcile hamnet with myself, apart from the workings of the book, that i, too, can try and thwart death if it is possible to take their place from its grasp), or from the picture of death being painted here that i personally connected with from seeing what happens to the people left behind. i loved these parts of the book the most, i think. the most i felt connected with this book was the chapter of hamnet's decision to lie down beside judith, take her hand, and try to will death to take him instead. despite the fact that this shouldn't have worked, it was a cute nudge to the well-known 

hamnet choosing death because he knew what the outcome he wanted was, what the truth of the matter is, unlike hamlet's famous soliloquy. he had no uncertainties aside from what happens after death, all he knows is that it would be an unbearable world without his twin sister. this is the choice, the action he chose to make

as someone who does love shakespeare, i was always of the opinion that hamnet's death did bleed into the writing of hamlet. despite the very loose plot connections, which this book does point out, and the fact that i believe twelfth night is still a more overlooked example of shakespeare's grief (or maybe that's my twelfth night bias talking), i think it's a bit insulting to think someone like shakespeare did not take notice that his new play's title has the same name as his deceased son's. two characters even share the name hamlet in this play: a father and son, the father is even a ghost; or more accurately, an apparition. so yes there isn't any outright evidence, but it would be remiss to think just because we cannot see it plainly doesn't mean it's not there, considering how much shakespeare infamously tried to root out his history and personality from his plays. i appreciate how o'farrell tried to look it at it from that point of view, even trying to give a hypothesis as to how the two are connected. do i agree with everything she laid out? no. do i still have appreciation for it? yes. i like the bit about shakespeare inserting himself into this ghost, this need for exchange, this process of grief. i am rather okay with the way it ended, though i did want just a bit more

i find this book hard to put a star rating to. i both enjoyed it and not. hm

shen

He, Hamnet, decrees it. It shall be.


some points strictly for sentimentality — i was not completely immune to o'farrell's tugging of heartstrings. a (rather verbose) portrait of grief, love, and loss. but i enjoy my purple prose, and can probably tolerate it more than others. for myself i can say more about what didn't work in this than what did: while i did like agnes being this sort of elf, wood sprite, fae being, or anything adjacent, i'm not sure i fully warmed up to the idea, considering the kind of book this is. i wondered if this woman from history couldn't have just been... ordinary? or would that not be as interesting? or is imagining a woman as all-knowing and strange and eccentric and special the only way we can write these retellings? i'm not very sure. an appreciated consequence of this was how she described the world around her, which was an advantage in o'farrell's storytelling. it gave the air in this book a sort of magical realism... then again, i would've preferred a grounded approach, but i enjoyed the fantastical aspect. the non-naming of shakespeare was a bit odd. if it was an attempt to decenter him in this agnes-centric book, the sole absence of his name just gives him more focus because of the oddity. i assume people reading this would know it's about shakespeare anyway, not to mention the notes at the start of the book. there was also this continuous focus on his bruise by his abusive grandfather's hand that ultimately ended up as nothing... which is a shame because i was looking forward to it having more importance, as i also did for other parts of this book

shockingly, i cared. i don't know how i did, because frankly there is not much written of the characters' relationships. i maintain the fact that i would have liked more of the present and not the past; we spend so much time catching up to the present with hamnet until at the end all we have of him is his birth and death. but i did care, which i'm not sure if it speaks from my love of siblings (that i could reconcile hamnet with myself, apart from the workings of the book, that i, too, can try and thwart death if it is possible to take their place from its grasp), or from the picture of death being painted here that i personally connected with from seeing what happens to the people left behind. i loved these parts of the book the most, i think. the most i felt connected with this book was the chapter of hamnet's decision to lie down beside judith, take her hand, and try to will death to take him instead. despite the fact that this shouldn't have worked, it was a cute nudge to the well-known To be, or not to be. hamnet choosing death because he knew what the outcome he wanted was, what the truth of the matter is, unlike hamlet's famous soliloquy. he had no uncertainties aside from what happens after death, all he knows is that it would be an unbearable world without his twin sister. this is the choice, the action he chose to make

as someone who does love shakespeare, i was always of the opinion that hamnet's death did bleed into the writing of hamlet. despite the very loose plot connections, which this book does point out, and the fact that i believe twelfth night is still a more overlooked example of shakespeare's grief (or maybe that's my twelfth night bias talking), i think it's a bit insulting to think someone like shakespeare did not take notice that his new play's title has the same name as his deceased son's. two characters even share the name hamlet in this play: a father and son, the father is even a ghost; or more accurately, an apparition. so yes there isn't any outright evidence, but it would be remiss to think just because we cannot see it plainly doesn't mean it's not there, considering how much shakespeare infamously tried to root out his history and personality from his plays. i appreciate how o'farrell tried to look it at it from that point of view, even trying to give a hypothesis as to how the two are connected. do i agree with everything she laid out? no. do i still have appreciation for it? yes. i like the bit about shakespeare inserting himself into this ghost, this need for exchange, this process of grief. i am rather okay with the way it ended, though i did want just a bit more

i find this book hard to put a star rating to. i both enjoyed it and not. hm

i sobbed this is such a beautiful tribute to femininity and nature and motherhood and family

zoe m

Helena

Adele Etheridge Woodson

i could not give less of a fuck about this book at the start, but i also do feel like that was influenced by my biggest opp being shakespeare himself, BUT towards the end of the book it had me in tears and i still think about this two whole months later, and it just made me read Hamlet so...take that as you will

Stas

Best book of 2025. So insanely beautifully written.

Pilar Abreu Fernandez

An incredibly moving exploration of familial relationships, grief and loss. Beautifully written and full of vivid imagery.

A tale of love, loss, mourning and grief. Following Agnes, Shakespeares wife, we see the daily toiles of the woman from the countryside. Missing her husband who moves to London to regain his spark, he pursuits his dream and achieves his goal of master playwright. However, the petulance targets his family and kills his only son. The rest of the book follows each family member and their way of grieving; Shakespeare’s being writing a play to keep his son’s name alive. Hamlet; the story of the half delirious king. Hamnets name lives on forever in the museum’s and libraries across the world. 

surtified™

The way a mother’s grief is articulated in this book is the most harrowing I’ve ever read and probably the most accurate description of grief I’ve read to date. Worth a read just for those two chapters tbh. Balled my eyes out.   

If you love or have an interest in Shakespeare and the history and myths surrounding him, this is such a good read. Although, I don’t think you need to know much to read it tbh. 

Anisah Osman Britton

The way a mother’s grief is articulated in this book is the most harrowing I’ve ever read and probably the most accurate description of grief I’ve read to date. Worth a read just for those two chapters tbh. Balled my eyes out.   

If you love or have an interest in Shakespeare and the history and myths surrounding him, this is such a good read. Although, I don’t think you need to know much to read it tbh. 

Sarah Chauvidon

« O mektup. Ne var ki o mektupta? Onu rahatsız eden, takıldığı şey hanımlardan söz edilmiş olması mı? Hiç sanmıyor. Daha çok kağıttan yayılan bir his. Kocasının yazdığı sözcüklerin arasından buhar gibi yükselen o sevinç. »

ceren koc

I hate to do this to one of my very dearest friends, whom i love and always value her book recs to the highest esteem. Even if it did take me a year and a half to get to this recommendation . Anyways Jacqui, this one just wasn’t it girl. When we meet next i’ll be keenly listening to your take and to what i happened to miss on this one. But for me, this was some sort of pandering, plotless, period piece that kind of failed to capture the shakespearean era of england because it was just spinning off to nowhere. 

First half of the book i couldn’t get the characters straight. Didn’t know who was married to, fancying, related to who. I felt slightly intrigued by this awkward youth who hit it off with the flower child witch lady. But that didn’t really ended up amounting to anything in the end.  I digress 

part 2- there’s a mean dad and a tough older brother who maybe will contribute to some throwing of fisticuffs and stimulate my drooping eyelids. Nope 

part 3- absent husband. And someone, a daughter, is going to die. for like half the book. Now at this point i’m thinking wait! Maybe this is a ghost story. I never read Hamlet but i think there’s a ghost. Someone dies, but not who you thought, but i hadn’t built and affinity for this character because the development lacked so i didn’t really mind. 

Part 4- Husband still absent but also still in love. Not much happens but he has money now. 

epilogue- it’s about hamlet, written by shakespeare, but also not really about them, just like kind of. 

*sigh of relief as i open a different book and think of ways to not upset jacqui by shredding her reco. How’d i do babe?? 

connor arnette

I hate to do this to one of my very dearest friends, whom i love and always value her book recs to the highest esteem. Even if it did take me a year and a half to get to this recommendation . Anyways Jacqui, this one just wasn’t it girl. When we meet next i’ll be keenly listening to your take and to what i happened to miss on this one. But for me, this was some sort of pandering, plotless, period piece that kind of failed to capture the shakespearean era of england because it was just spinning off to nowhere. 

my experience went as follows. 

First half of the book i couldn’t get the characters straight. Didn’t know who was married to, fancying, related to who. I felt slightly intrigued by this awkward youth who hit it off with the flower child witch lady. But that didn’t really ended up amounting to anything in the end.  I digress 

part 2- there’s a mean dad and a tough older brother who maybe will contribute to some throwing of fisticuffs and stimulate my drooping eyelids. Nope 

part 3- absent husband. And someone, a daughter, is going to die. for like half the book. Now at this point i’m thinking wait! Maybe this is a ghost story. I never read Hamlet but i think there’s a ghost. Someone dies, but not who you thought, but i hadn’t built and affinity for this character because the development lacked so i didn’t really mind. 

Part 4- Husband still absent but also still in love. Not much happens but he has money now. 

epilogue- it’s about hamlet, written by shakespeare, but also not really about them, just like kind of. 

*sigh of relief as i open a different book and think of ways to not upset jacqui by shredding her reco. How’d i do babe?? 



Katerina

One of those books that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page. It haunts you. It fills you with so much grief, it devastates you. 

It tells the story of Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, who share a great love, a connection that filled me with so much hope that with each turn of the page, I dreaded it being tethered. Because after the death of their son, everything shatters. 

From the beginning, Maggie O’Farrell gripped me with her words. Like magic. Like music. If some say that she is a master of describing grief, I’d say she’s a master of words, of language, of literature. She has written a masterpiece, a book I think we will still be reading in a century. 

In “Hamnet”, we follow and feel for each of the characters — the husband (he, him, but never his actual name. Shakespeare is nameless in this one), his sister, his mother, his two daughters, the son, who is about to die. But mostly, we feel for his wife. Agnes is the protagonist of this story, the sheer force of it. The heart of every page and why the grief in this book feels so real, torturous even. 

Unlike Shakespeare’s, her name lives on every page of this book. It’s emphasized even. So much, that at the beginning, O’Farrell beautifully describes its pronunciation and you can even feel her name being imprinted in Shakespeare’s heart.


  “Agnes. Said differently from how it might be written on a page, with that near-hidden, secret g. The tongue curls towards it yet barely touches it. Ann-yis. Agn-yez. One must lean into the first syllable, then skip over the next.”


The contrast between the two main characters is so strong — one is nameless, the other carries her name in this story like shield, like weapon.

Generally, O’Farrell’s decision to never mention the name of Shakespeare was so intriguing to me. The husband, the lover, the father is separated from the great playwright. We see Shakespeare the way Agnes sees him, the way his family and his children do. The name is removed as if not to distract us. As if to help us perceive this genius of a man as a mere human being — flawed, like the rest of us. 

But this book is so much more than Shakespeare, his family, and his son, who is about to inspire a play that is performed to this day. “Hamnet” is about grief, about rememberance, about the bravery of mourning your child in a world that just wants to forget. 

Somewhere, around the middle of this book, when Death comes, when this book truly breaks you, you start to realize that grief has many forms. Grief can be alienation from the world, your life and what you, as an individual, once was. A separation from everything that made you, you. Grief can be drowning yourself in work, in words, and always in the search of what you lost. Always looking for his face in the crowd, in the street. Everywhere. Even in your own daughter. 


  “Is this the face he would have had?”


And after Death comes for Hamnet, O’Farrell refuses to be done with the reader. The epigraph to the second part of the novel, where the author quotes “Hamlet” holds the meaning of everything that is about to come: 

“I am dead: 
thou livest… draw thy breath in pain. 
To tell my story.”  

Many have suggested that “Hamlet”, the play, is about remembrance, about what happens when the rituals of mourning collapse. In “Hamnet”, the book, Agnes refuses to let go. She carries her grief everywhere. Her son’s absence has become her life’s “epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns”. She performs these little rituals of grieving, of mourning, every day: she takes a lock of Hamnet’s hair and stores it, she refuses to move his clothing, she constantly listens for his footsteps. Her grief becomes unsettling for everyone around her. So much that it transforms her relationship with her husband, her understanding of life, of herself. 

And in the meaning of practicing rememberance daily, Maggie O’Farrell makes us witnesses of Agnes’ husband, who has escaped far away from her unsettling grief, performing the same rituals. But in the only way he knows how. With his words, with ink on paper. And at the end of this book, the husband, the lover, the father becomes one with the great playwright. An alchemist of some sort in Agnes’ eyes. 

He performs the ritual of bringing back the dead. He has done the only thing a parent would ever wish to do — switch places and have Death take him instead. Now, their son lives forever in his play. He has become eternal. 

“Hamnet” finishes off with Agnes seeing her husband’s play, her child alive on stage, and the ritual of mourning finally understood by the soul closest to hers. 

And nothing holds more the true meaning of this book than the last words, spoken by her husband on stage: 


  “Remember me.”


….A true masterpiece!

WINNER OF THE 2020 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION - THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Richly sensuous... something special' The Sunday Times 'A thing of shimmering wonder' David Mitchell TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART. On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week. Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

Alba Ramos

i read the last few paragraphs, closed to book, stared at the ceiling and then did it 2 more times and i only stopped cause my eye started itching

I came into this one a little bit skeptical, being a fictionalized biography of sorts. The book did not fall into that trap at all. It's an immensely well-crafted story about life, in all its heart-wrenching beauty. 

Frederik De Bosschere

elizabeth

We so often think of Shakespeare as an otherworldly talent. There's legend spun around him. He's practically worshipped (and I'm not exempt; my own admiration of Shakespeare made me interested in this novel in the first place). 

O'Farrell strips William Shakespeare of this sort of supernaturalness. He's unnamed, and his character is more defined by his actions toward his family (good or bad) than his talent or success. O'Farrell takes all the myth she removes from William and bestows it onto his wife, Agnes, who becomes the central character. She's enchanting and ethereal but earthy and grounded. 

There isn't much story in Hamnet. But, thanks to O'Farrell's prose and her taking plenty of time to flesh out characters' backgrounds and personalities, the plot doesn't necessarily feel thin or fluffy, just slow.

Luke Harkness

I didn't get Hamnet at first I was confused as to what was going on and where it was going. However, about halfway through the book, it clicked and I fell in love.

Utterly beautiful. Utterly compelling. 

Read my full review on www.lukeharkness.com

Lindy

Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet tells the story of how the death of Will Shakespeare's son impacted the development of his most famous play. Albeit light on the historicity (no mentions of a particular Thomas Kyd tragedy or the possible 1587 Ur-Hamlet here!), Hamnet is set in a world where child mortality is high, death during childbirth is common, and at any point one's whole family could perish from bubonic plague; the thematic throughline from Hamlet to Hamnet is grief. 

Rarely is it the case that the protagonist the reason I like a book less than I think I ought to, but I cannot get behind most the creative choices behind Agnes as a character. She's presented as a witch-goddess with a literal evil stepmother and mysterious knowledge of future medical practices. I don't think this serves the story well, as in terms of structure, affect, etc. the novel clearly attempts naturalism. (Compare to, say, Laurus which is decidedly and purposefully not.) Additionally, I didn't like that what I supposed would be a main theme based on the description -- an artist's responsibility to those whose lives are drawn upon in their work a la The Story of the Lost Child-- only factored in the last twenty percent and felt underdeveloped.

Sonia Grgas

A beautifully-written book that provides insight into how Shakespeare’s personal life may have influenced one of the world’s most famous plays, Hamlet. 

The story unfolds with a similar narrative to that of O’Farrell’s most recent piece of work, The Marriage Portrait. You flash back and forwards between Shakespeare’s youth and the death of his son in 1956. 

One thing I found interesting about this book was the author’s decision to never mention Shakespeare by name. O’Farrell opts to focus on the role his wife had in shaping his life and career. I find pieces of work that tell the stories of invisible women throughout history fascinating, albeit a piece of fiction.

The writing is incredible, the pages are emotionally-charged and there’s so much depth and colour to the characters. The novel touches on the theme of grief and loss in such a nuanced way, to the extent that I felt so moved during some parts of the book. It’s definitely going to be one that sticks with me for a while.

Robyn Claridge

A beautifully-written book that provides insight into how Shakespeare’s personal life may have influenced one of the world’s most famous plays, Hamlet. 

The story unfolds with a similar narrative to that of O’Farrell’s most recent piece of work, The Marriage Portrait. You flash back and forwards between Shakespeare’s youth and the death of his son in 1956. 

One thing I found interesting about this book was the author’s decision to never mention Shakespeare by name. O’Farrell opts to focus on the role his wife had in shaping his life and career. I find pieces of work that tell the stories of invisible women throughout history fascinating, albeit a piece of fiction.

The writing is incredible, the pages are emotionally-charged and there’s so much depth and colour to the characters. The novel touches on the theme of grief and loss in such a nuanced way, to the extent that I felt so moved during some parts of the book. It’s definitely going to be one that sticks with me for a while.