Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525657606
Summary
England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young, alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.
A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman.
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK
• Raised—Wales and Scotland, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—Costa Award; Betty Trask Award; Somerset Maugham Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Maggie O'Farrell is a British author of contemporary fiction, who was once featured in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. It is possible to identify several common themes in her novels—the relationship between sisters is one, another is loss and the psychological impact of those losses on the lives of her characters.
The Vanishing Act Esme Lennox was published in 2007. In 2010 O'Farrell won the Costa novel award for The Hand That First Held Mine. Her 2013 novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, also received wide acclaim.
Maggie was born in Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. At the age of eight she missed a year of school due to a viral infection, an event that is echoed in The Distance Between Us. Maggie worked as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as the Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday. She has also taught creative writing.
She is married to the novelist William Sutcliffe, whom she met at Cambridge. They live in Hampstead Heath, London, with their two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Hamnet is an exploration of marriage and grief written… of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure.… It is O'Farrell's extended speculation on how Hamnet's death might have fueled the creation of one of his father's greatest plays…. [O'Farrell] has a melodic relationship to language. There is a poetic cadence to her writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world.
Geraldine Brooks - New York Times Book Review
Miraculous… brilliant.… A novel told with the urgency of a whispered prayer—or curse…. [T]hrough the alchemy of her own vision, [O'Farrell] has created a moving story about the way loss viciously recalibrates a marriage.… A richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Magnificent and searing…. A family saga… bursting with life, touched by magic, and anchored in affection.…[H]ere is a novel that matches him with a woman overwhelmingly more than worthy.… I nearly drowned at the end of this book…. It would be wise to keep some tissues handy…. So gorgeously written that it transports you from our own plague time right into another and makes you glad to be there.
Boston Globe
All too timely…inspired…. [An] exceptional historical novel.
New Yorker
A tour de force…. Although more than 400 years have unspooled since Hamnet Shakespeare's death, the story O'Farrell weaves in this moving novel is timeless and ever-relevant.… O'Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent's worst nightmare: the death of a child.… Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell. But with this historical novel she has expanded her repertoire….
NPR
(Starred review) [A]n outstanding masterpiece…. The book is filled with astonishing, timely passages, such as the plague’s journey to Stratford via a monkey’s flea from Alexandria. This is historical fiction at its best.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) This striking, painfully lovely novel captures the very nature of grief.
Booklist
(Starred review) [O'Farrell's] gifts for full-bodied characterization and sensitive rendering of intricate family bonds are on full display.… A gripping drama of the conflict between love and destiny.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for HAMNET ... then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the way in which Maggie O'Farrell's novel speculates that 11-year-old Hamnet's death may have sparked the creation of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies.
2. How would you describe Agnes—what kind of a character is she? To the towns people she is almost a celebrity, a creature of near myth. In what way?
3. How does the author imagine Agnes and Will coming together, first as lovers, then as husband and wife? Consider Shakespeare's first view of Agnes. How would you describe their marriage?
4. Agnes is the novel's center. Why do you think Shakespeare goes unnamed, referred to instead as "her husband," "the father," and the "Latin tutor."
5. In what ways is this novel about grief, our all too human responses to it, the damages it causes, and the long arm of its persistence. O'Farrell writes at the onset of her novel, "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."
6. (Follow-up to Question 5) Talk about the way Agnes responds when she sees the version of her son's name on the Hamlet London playbill. Consider, too, Agnes's thoughts when, as an audience member, she sees her husband play the role of the ghost: It is, she thinks, "what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own."
7. O'Farrell gives us detailed, lyrical depictions of everyday life in Warwickshire. What struck you most about her portrayal of Elizabethan English life? Were the descriptions overlong, or did you feel they breathed life into the novel?
8. In The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, Shakespeare plays with gender-fluidity, showing a close affinity between males and females. How does O'Farrell incorporate that tendency in her novel Hamnet, especially between the twins and even Shakespeare's first sight of Agnes?
9. Hamnet was published in 2020, a year of global pandemic. In the middle of her novel, O'Farrell transports us to the Mediterranean Sea, where readers are given a horrific lesson in 16th-century epidemiology. How does the spread of the Bubonic Plague 400 years earlier parallel our own recent experiences with Covid-19?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)