Maggie O'Farrell

"Remarkable . . . will leave you shaking with loss but also the love from which family is spun." Emma Donoghue, author of Room "Without a doubt one of the best novels I've ever read." Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART. England, 1580. A young Latin tutor--penniless, bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an 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 on the Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband. His gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when their beloved twins, Hamnet and Judith, are afflicted with the bubonic plague, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness. 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 & Judith is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers.

A Novel

Hamnet and Judith

Erin 

Oddly enough, even though this book took me nearly 4 months to finish, I actually think it’s very good. I’m not sure how much I liked it, but I do appreciate how gifted the author is in writing the story. It’s clearly very well crafted, and I would not hesitate to pick up another book by this author again. But it took me 4 months, and that’s largely because I found it fairly difficult to follow. There are multiple timelines along the same story, and it’s never explicitly stated or clear which one you are currently in. It took me ages to figure this out. Not to mention the fact that a lot of names have been changed in this story, and I struggled with who is supposed to be who. It’s obvious to every reader who this story is about (even though it’s never explicitly stated), and yet neither the name William nor Shakespeare can be found within its pages. You’d be hard-pressed to find the names Anne or Hathaway either. The author explains the Anne irregularity in the author’s note, and how Anne is actually Agnes, which is likely to be her real name anyhow. But no one flips to the author’s note at the end before they read the book, and therefore the only way I even knew who we were talking about at the beginning was because of a review I preemptively read before I started. And then there’s all the extended family members, some of whom appear in more than one timeline, and some of them have more than one name too, which just makes it terribly difficult to even follow along. Mix that with the writing that nearly almost is too pretty for a complicated story about grief and family in 16th century England. Now, back to the part where I said I liked this book, because I really truly did. Even though I found it difficult to follow along, the writing was comforting and made me feel inside the story, feeling the emotions of the love and the loss between its pages. To read about how Hamnet’s parents and family reacted to his death was actually a wonderful experience, and had I been able to develop an attachment to any of them, surely I would have teared up. While historical fiction is my favourite genre, I don’t tend to read Renaissance books or really anything past Jane Austen, which means that while my experience in 15th century historical fiction is limited, I actually enjoyed my time reading this and would consider reading books about it again. And if they are written by Maggie O’Farrell, even better - as long as I can tell who is who and which timeline is which.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Hamnet and Judith A Novel

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