When the pandemic lockdown began in 2020, rather than running away from plague narratives, I turned toward them. There was something counterintuitively cathartic about confronting this suddenly all-too-real fear through fiction—seeing catastrophe refracted through another time and imagination. I read "The Stand," Stephen King’s apocalyptic epic; "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel; and Maggie O’Farrell’s "Hamnet," which, out of all those remarkable books, was the one that lingered most. It felt eerily prescient, a novel about a family undone by disease and grief, yet held together by love and the spirit of art. In anticipation of the forthcoming film adaptation, I recently returned to it—and found it resonates even more powerfully on a second reading.
"Hamnet" imagines the brief life and death of Shakespeare’s son, who died in 1596, and the devastating ripple that loss sends through his family—especially his mother, Agnes, a woman of exceeding intuition and almost supernatural insight, whose connection to the natural world cannot save her child. O’Farrell’s prose is intimate and sensory, moving between domestic urgency and timeless myth. The novel’s emotional center lies not only in a mother’s grief but in the act of artistic transmutation: four years later, the father writes a play called "Hamlet." The names, O’Farrell reminds us, are “in fact the same…entirely interchangeable,” and that linguistic coincidence becomes the hinge between life and art, love and loss.
O’Farrell achieves this intimacy through deliberate structural choices. The novel employs close third-person narration that shifts fluidly between characters—Agnes’s intuitive perceptions, Hamnet’s childlike confusion, and Shakespeare’s (unnamed in the story) creative refuge. This technique creates a mosaic of perspectives that binds us to the family’s tragedy while maintaining emotional distance from Shakespeare’s mythical status. O’Farrell forces us to see him stripped of genius, accountable only for his domestic failures and absences. It’s a radical de-centering of the canonical figure, asking us to consider not the artist’s brilliance but the domestic price of that brilliance.
The novel’s most audacious technical choice lies in how O’Farrell traces the pestilence itself. She makes a bold narrative detour, beginning with Venetian glass beads and following fleas across Mediterranean trade routes, through ships’ cats and contaminated rags stuffed carelessly into cargo boxes. This meticulous, almost forensic tracking transforms an abstract historical threat into an intimate betrayal, showing how global commerce and tiny human errors—a glassmaker’s hand slipping into flame, a cabin boy’s momentary fascination with a monkey on an Alexandrian dock—conspire to reach one specific family in Stratford. It’s a startling reminder that plague, like grief, arrives through a chain of contingencies we can neither predict nor likely prevent. Through this unique technique, O’Farrell makes the disease a character, with its own journey and logic, so that Hamnet’s death feels simultaneously random and inevitable.
At the heart of the novel is Agnes, who possesses an uncanny gift: she can read a person’s essence by touching the muscle between the thumb and forefinger, sense illness in the air, and divine secrets others wish to hide. Yet this foresight fails her when it matters most. Her self-recrimination is visceral—she becomes an “ineffectual, prideful fool” convinced that her herbs could match the pestilence. O’Farrell allows Agnes to linger in this agony—with the unbearable knowledge that her gift, her wisdom, her fierce protective instinct—none of it was enough.
Yet O’Farrell doesn’t vilify the father for being absent. His need for London is presented not as abandonment but as psychological survival. Raised by an abusive father whose rages “arrived from nowhere, like a gale,” the tutor-turned-playwright requires the theater as refuge. His writing offers him “peace so absorbing, so soothing, so private” that nothing else will suffice—a sanctuary from both his father’s legacy and the suffocating grief that threatens to keep him “mired in Stratford for ever.” When he finally transforms Hamnet’s name into "Hamlet" four years later, O’Farrell asks us to see it as the only resurrection available to him, not merely as appropriation: he places himself in the role of the Ghost, exchanging places with his son in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy “in the only way he can.” It’s an act of artistic necessity that feels simultaneously like theft and tribute, a testament to how creation feeds on what we love most and can least afford to lose.
The novel’s subplot—young Hamnet’s desperate attempt to “hoodwink Death” by swapping places with his ailing twin Judith—adds another layer to this meditation on exchange and substitution. The twins are described as “entirely interchangeable,” mirror images who delight in confusing others about their identities. When Hamnet realizes Judith is dying, he deliberately lies in her bed, willing his strength into her, hoping Death will make a mistake and take him instead. This childlike faith in the power of substitution echoes throughout the novel’s structure, culminating in the father’s later act of literary substitution—one name for another, life transformed into art, presence replaced by performance.
Published in March 2020, just as the world entered its own plague narrative, "Hamnet" gained an eerie prescience O’Farrell couldn’t have anticipated. The novel’s depiction of playhouses shuttered “by order of the Queen,” of families separated by days’ travel when illness strikes, of the tension between ineffective formal medicine and desperate folk remedies—all resonated with uncanny immediacy. Yet O’Farrell’s achievement transcends this accidental timing. She reminds us that plague has always worked this way: chaotically disrupting, isolating, forcing impossible choices between presence and survival, between the living and the work that might outlast them.
Reading "Hamnet" during a global pandemic felt like an act of communion across centuries. O’Farrell captures both the randomness and inevitability of plague—its movement through trade routes and chance encounters—and the intimate domestic spaces it shatters. O’Farrell leaves us with this uncomfortable question: Can art justify the sacrifice of those who make it possible? Agnes watches the boy actor embodying Hamlet and recognizes that her husband has “done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own.” But she also knows he took “the most sacred and tender of names and tossed it in among a jumble of other words.” Both truths coexist.
Out of unbearable grief emerges the drive to create, to name, and thereby to endure—but also to appropriate, to leave, to choose the “landscape” in one’s head over the living beings in one’s house. This is the dichotomy "Hamnet" examines: not simply the creation of art from suffering, but the precise human cost of that transmutation. Four centuries later, we still reckon with that bargain: the immortal play that survives, and the boy whose name it carries, gone forever.
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Customers say
Customers praise the book's poetic prose and vivid storytelling, describing it as a beautiful tale of human nature filled with heart-wrenching emotion. Moreover, the characters are fully realized, and customers find it completely enthralling. However, the readability and pacing receive mixed reviews - while some find it extremely readable, others say it's hard to follow, and while some appreciate the pacing, others find it slow-moving.
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469 customers mention content, 406 positive, 63 negative
Great read for the enduring hardships of the commoners during the Renaissance period when life fun by the guilds and theatre is becoming a popular...Read more
Great book. Grabbed my attention right away and did not let go. I thought that each sentence painted a picture for me.Read more
Heartbreaking. Wonderful. A blessing to read. I think this is a new favorite historical novel. Just a fabulous, excellent read.Read more
Amazing writer who captures your attention throughout. Wonderful book and so well written. Love this author and look forward to more of her booksRead more
395 customers mention writing style, 369 positive, 26 negative
This is an excellent book . It’s a highly engaging story and beautifully written. I highly recommend Hamnet to anyone who likes historical fiction.Read more
...Evokes strong emotions. Well written, fascinating, detailed story of a young life in a long ago time, at once unfamiliar and strange, and yet so real...Read more
Significant portions of this "historical fiction" novel are very well written - especially the route of the flea bringing the plague to England and...Read more
...Many reviewers have effusively praised the beautiful writing; and while it had it's moments, you must wade through pages of tedious descriptions to...Read more
242 customers mention story, 210 positive, 32 negative
What a great story. The writing is so beautiful and I want to spend time with Agnes, an amazing insightful characterRead more
What a wonderful story. I am in awe over this book. No matter if you are a Shakespeare fan or not, this book should be on your “to read” list....Read more
I didn’t want it to end. A fascinating story that draws you in and leaves an imprint. There are many scenes that left me overcome with emotion.Read more
...Thank you for every sentence of this beautiful story.Read more
153 customers mention emotional, 129 positive, 24 negative
This is so beautifully written, at once joyful and heartbreaking. Humans are the same now as hundreds of years ago. I didn’t want it to end.Read more
This is a well conceived, well written book. It is about love, grief, and connection and even suggests yet another way to interpret Hamlet....Read more
...The writing is eloquent and evocative. As one consequence of the better writing, the characters gain more dimension....Read more
...Beautifully written, poignant. Takes you to another time so completely.Read more
152 customers mention engaging, 131 positive, 21 negative
The book was well-written, and interesting, in that it addressed some of the mysteries of Shakespeare’s life: why he abandoned Stratford, what his...Read more
...Evokes strong emotions. Well written, fascinating, detailed story of a young life in a long ago time, at once unfamiliar and strange, and yet so real...Read more
Enjoyable. Other worldly. Clear descriptions paint a different world. The sense of grief was written with strength. Great read and would recommend.Read more
Interesting read….Shakespeare is never named; merely called the Latin Tutor while Agnes' character is fully developed....Read more
141 customers mention character development, 119 positive, 22 negative
Solid historical fiction. A bit self serving. Great character development. I need more words to close this out. How’s that?Read more
...well written, agnes was really the star of the book, who was a fascinating character. Kinda of a slow start.Read more
Very good story with interesting characters. Sad story but captivating. Recommend.Read more
Descriptions, character development, imagery all lovely. Interesting setting, story and historical events....Read more
92 customers mention readability, 56 positive, 36 negative
...Well worth reading.Read more
...The book is a really slow, dull read, with none of the poetry of language that one should expect on a subject related to Shakespeare....Read more
It is very well written and easy to read. I like historical novels but did not know anything about Shakespear's family....Read more
...Well worth the read.Read more
80 customers mention pacing, 41 positive, 39 negative
Like walking into a beautiful dream...utterly captivating and deeply moving. This is a book I will be returning to again and again.Read more
I had such high hopes for this, but found it tedious and dismal and couldn’t wait for it to end. Too much third person. Good descriptions, though.Read more
It is a very moving, deeply depicted, and magnificent historical novel. Every character was unique and interesting....Read more
...It is not a quick read but it is a read that will stay with you,Read more
A beautifully-written masterpiece
How does a family go on after their boy - their son, their brother, their twin - ceases to exist? How does life continue after a mother, father, and sisters watch the boy being lowered into the ground? How does a marriage already strained by distance and time apart bear this loss? These are some of the themes explored by author Maggie O'Farrell in Hamnet, a beautifully-written masterpiece which imagines the story of the life - and death - of William Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet. The year is 1596 in rural Stratford, England. Eleven-year-old Hamnet (a name interchangeable during this time with Hamlet) lives with his mother, Agnes, and sisters Susanna and Judith (his twin) while his father - whose name is never mentioned - resides in London, finding great success as a playwright and ensemble actor on the city's stages. One day, while the rest of the family is out, Judith falls ill with the plague. Within a day, her loving and devoted twin will play a trick on Death, exchanging places with Judith, and ultimately sacrificing his life so she can live. What follows is an exquisite tale of unbridled grief, of learning to survive when a part of you is missing forever, of forgiveness and healing and bearing life, and of turning loss into inspiration - in this case, inspiration for one of the most famous tragic plays of all time. I absolutely loved this book. Admittedly, although I have read several of Shakespeare's plays and seen many movies based on his works and life, I have never read the play Hamlet. I found, however, that this didn't take away from my enjoyment of the novel at all. The writing is so gorgeous, like that of an artist painting a picture, or weaving of a detailed tapestry. The tragic love story of Hamnet's parents blooms in tandem with the equally tragic story of the young man's last days and untimely death. I have never before read a story in which the death of a beloved family member is described with such heartfelt and soul-crushing detail. This book is a thing apart, and the business of feeling, the love and loss, emanate from every page. Hamnet has garnered such amazing critical praise, and for a very good reason. In my opinion, it's perfect. I savored every page and each individual person's story. I have a bad habit of not re-reading most books, but I feel that I'll be revisiting this one in the future, and will again feel ALL the feels for Hamnet and his family.
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Jesús Neri RincónReviewed in Mexico on February 6, 2026
Best book ever
El libro llegó puntual acorde con la fecha pactada. El producto se encuentra muy bien cuidado. La película me encantó, y muero por leer el libro.Jesús Neri RincónBest book ever
Reviewed in Mexico on February 6, 2026
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