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Hamnet Hardcover – Deckle Edge, July 21, 2020
Purchase options and add-ons
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 just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateJuly 21, 2020
- Dimensions6.65 x 1.3 x 9.57 inches
- ISBN-100525657606
- ISBN-13978-0525657606
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"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. . . . We can smell the tang of the various new leathers in the glover's workshop, the fragrance of the apples racked a finger-width apart in the winter storage shed. . . . As the book unfolds, it brings its story to a tender and ultimately hopeful conclusion: that even the greatest grief, the most damaged marriage, and most shattered heart might find some solace, some healing."
—Geraldine Brooks, the New York Times Book Review
“All too timely . . . inspired. . . . [An] exceptional historical novel ”
—The New Yorker
"Magnificent and searing. . . . A family saga so bursting with life, touched by magic, and anchored in affection. . . . Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life, about whether he even wrote his own plays, here is a novel that matches him with a woman overwhelmingly more than worthy."
—The Boston Globe
"A tour de force. . . . Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages—from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell."
—NPR
"O'Farrell moves through the family's pain like a master of signs and signals. . . . In Hamnet, art imitates life not to co-opt reality, but to help us bear it."
—Los Angeles Times
"Wholly original, fully engrossing. . . . Agnes is a character for the ages—engimatic, fully formed and nearly literally bewitching to behold in every scene she's in."
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A moving portrait of a mother’s grief. . . . O’Farrell’s prose is characteristically beautiful.”
—The Wall Street Journal
"Miraculous... brilliant... A novel told with the urgency of a whispered prayer — or curse... through the alchemy of her own vision, she 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, The Washington Post
"What could be more common, over centuries and continents, than the death of a child - and yet Maggie O’Farrell, with her flawless sentences and furious heart, somehow makes it new. This story of remarkable people bereft of their boy will leave you shaking with loss but also the love from which family is spun."
--Emma Donoghue, author of Room
"Grief and loss so finely written I could hardly bear to read it"
--Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall
"A bold undertaking, beautifully imagined and written"
--Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: A Life
"Heartstopping. Hamnet does for the Shakespeare story what Jean Rhys did for Jane Eyre, inhabiting it, enlarging it and enriching it in ways that will alter the readers view for ever"
--Patrick Gale, author of A Place Called Winter
"Exquisite, immersive and compelling… deserves to win prizes"
--Marian Keyes, author of The Break
"It so happens that the child at the center of Hamnet inspired one of civilization’s most famous plays, but in Maggie O’Farrell’s gifted hands, Hamnet feels as real as my own child. The raw physical life of O’Farrell’s Renaissance England is enthralling. But the beating heart of this book is Hamnet’s mother – an indelible, dauntless woman. What a sensual, full-throated love song to the lost child."
--Amity Gaige
"Hamnet is a beautiful read, a devastating one, intricate, and breathtakingly imaginative. It will stay with me a long time"
--Rachel Joyce
"I'm absolutely blown away by Maggie O'Farrell's HAMNET. Love, grief, hope, resilience - the world of this novel is so vivid I could nearly smell the grass in the fields, hear the rain in the gutters. In moments where the story shoots up to heaven I was there, too, grieving with these characters, feeling how lucky we all are to be alive, understanding how desperately we want the people we love to be remembered. It's without a doubt one of the best novels I've ever read."
--Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes
"A bold, beautiful, heart-breaking novel. Maggie has taken on both the most famous writer in the world and the mantle of history with effortless grace. In the process she’s written the book of her life. I’m wildly jealous!"
--Tracy Chevalier
"I don’t know how anyone could fail to love this book. It is a marvel: a great work of imaginative recreation and a great story. It is also a moral achievement to have transformed that young child from being a literary footnote into someone so tenderly alive that part of you wishes he had survived and Hamlet never been written"
--Dominic Dromgoole, author of Hamlet, Globe to Globe
“Evocative. . . . [Hamnet] is also life-affirming as it suggests ways art can transcend misfortune.”
—National Review
“Superb. . . . O’Farrell’s exquisitely wrought eighth novel proves once again what a very fine writer she is.”
—Financial Times
“Elliptical, dreamlike. . . . [Hamnet] confirms O’Farrell as an extraordinarily versatile writer, with a profound understanding of the most elemental human bonds—qualities also possessed by a certain former Latin tutor from Stratford.”
—The Observer (UK)
“A remarkable piece of work. . . . O’Farrell is one of the most surprisingly quiet radicals in fiction.”
—The Scotsman (UK)
“[A] portrayal of grief and pain. . . . O’Farrell describes these agonies with such power that Hamnet would resonate at any time.”
—The Guardian
“[O’Farrell is] a writer of rare emotional intelligence whose personal intimations of mortality bear rich fruit in this, her eighth novel.”
—Evening Standard
“This artfully paced novel is an anatomy of grief. . . . Just when the novel’s second part seems to be moving to a tragic conclusion, it mounts a stunning redemptive volte-face.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
"This striking, painfully lovely novel captures the very nature of grief."
--Booklist [starred review]
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The passage is narrow and twists back on itself. He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud.
Near the bottom, he pauses for a moment, looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs, as is his habit. He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor.
It is a close, windless day in late summer, and the downstairs room is slashed by long strips of light. The sun glowers at him from outside, the windows latticed slabs of yellow, set into the plaster.
He gets up, rubbing his legs. He looks one way, up the stairs; he looks the other, unable to decide which way he should turn.
The room is empty, the fire ruminating in its grate, orange embers below soft, spiralling smoke. His injured kneecaps throb in time with his heartbeat. He stands with one hand resting on the latch of the door to the stairs, the scuffed leather tip of his boot raised, poised for motion, for flight. His hair, light-coloured, almost gold, rises up from his brow in tufts.
There is no one here.
He sighs, drawing in the warm, dusty air and moves through the room, out of the front door and on to the street. The noise of barrows, horses, vendors, people calling to each other, a man hurling a sack from an upper window doesn’t reach him. He wanders along the front of the house and into the neighbouring doorway.
The smell of his grandparents’ home is always the same: a mix of woodsmoke, polish, leather, wool. It is similar yet indefinably different from the adjoining two-roomed apartment, built by his grandfather in a narrow gap next to the larger house, where he lives with his mother and sisters. Sometimes he cannot understand why this might be. The two dwellings are, after all, separated by only a thin wattled wall but the air in each place is of a different ilk, a different scent, a different temperature.
This house whistles with draughts and eddies of air, with the tapping and hammering of his grandfather’s workshop, with the raps and calls of customers at the window, with the noise and welter of the courtyard out the back, with the sound of his uncles coming and going.
But not today. The boy stands in the passageway, listening for signs of occupation. He can see from here that the workshop, to his right, is empty, the stools at the benches vacant, the tools idle on the counters, a tray of abandoned gloves, like handprints, left out for all to see. The vending window is shut and bolted tight. There is no one in the dining hall, to his left. A stack of napkins is piled on the long table, an unlit candle, a heap of feathers. Nothing more.
He calls out, a cry of greeting, a questioning sound. Once, twice, he makes this noise. Then he cocks his head, listening for a response.
Nothing. Just the creaking of beams expanding gently in the sun, the sigh of air passing under doors, between rooms, the swish of linen drapes, the crack of the fire, the indefinable noise of a house at rest, empty.
His fingers tighten around the iron of the door handle. The heat of the day, even this late, causes sweat to express itself from the skin of his brow, down his back. The pain in his knees sharpens, twinges, then fades again.
The boy opens his mouth. He calls the names, one by one, of all the people who live here, in this house. His grandmother. The maid. His uncles. His aunt. The apprentice. His grandfather. The boy tries them all, one after another. For a moment, it crosses his mind to call his father’s name, to shout for him, but his father is miles and hours and days away, in London, where the boy has never been.
But where, he would like to know, are his mother, his older sister, his grandmother, his uncles? Where is the maid? Where is his grandfather, who tends not to leave the house by day, who is usually to be found in the workshop, harrying his apprentice or reckoning his takings in a ledger? Where is everyone? How can both houses be empty?
He moves along the passageway. At the door to the workshop, he stops. He throws a quick glance over his shoulder, to make sure nobody is there, then steps inside.
His grandfather’s glove workshop is a place he is rarely allowed to enter. Even to pause in the doorway is forbidden. Don’t stand there idling, his grandfather will roar. Can’t a man do an honest day’s work without people stopping to gawk at him? Have you nothing better to do than loiter there catching flies?
Hamnet’s mind is quick: he has no trouble understanding the schoolmasters’ lessons. He can grasp the logic and sense of what he is being told, and he can memorise readily. Recalling verbs and grammar and tenses and rhetoric and numbers and calculations comes to him with an ease that can, on occasion, attract the envy of other boys. But his is a mind also easily distracted. A cart going past in the street during a Greek lesson will draw his attention away from his slate to wonderings as to where the cart might be going and what it could be carrying and how about that time his uncle gave him and his sisters a ride on a haycart, how wonderful that was, the scent and prick of new-cut hay, the wheels tugged along to the rhythm of the tired mare’s hoofs. More than twice in recent weeks he has been whipped at school for not paying attention (his grandmother has said if it happens once more, just once, she will send word of it to his father). The schoolmasters cannot understand it. Hamnet learns quickly, can recite by rote, but he will not keep his mind on his work.
The noise of a bird in the sky can make him cease speaking, mid-utterance, as if the very heavens have struck him deaf and dumb at a stroke. The sight of a person entering a room, out of the corner of his eye, can make him break off whatever he is doing—eating, reading, copying out his schoolwork—and gaze at them as if they have some important message just for him. He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him. Wake up, child, his grandmother will shout, snapping her fingers at him. Come back, his older sister, Susanna, will hiss, flicking his ear. Pay attention, his schoolmasters will yell. Where did you go? Judith will be whispering to him, when he finally re-enters the world, when he comes to, when he glances around to find that he is back, in his house, at his table, surrounded by his family, his mother eyeing him, half smiling, as if she knows exactly where he’s been.
In the same way, now, walking into the forbidden space of the glove workshop, Hamnet has lost track of what he is meant to be doing. He has momentarily slipped free of his moorings, of the fact that Judith is unwell and needs someone to care for her, that he is meant to be finding their mother or grandmother or anyone else who might know what to do.
Skins hang from a rail. Hamnet knows enough to recognise the rust-red spotted hide of a deer, the delicate and supple kidskin, the smaller pelts of squirrels, the coarse and bristling boarskin. As he moves nearer to them, the skins start to rustle and stir on their hangings, as if some life might yet be left in them, just a little, just enough for them to hear him coming. Hamnet extends a finger and touches the goat hide. It is unaccountably soft, like the brush of river weed against his legs when he swims on hot days. It sways gently to and fro, legs splayed, stretched out, as if in flight, like a bird or a ghoul.
Hamnet turns, surveys the two seats at the workbench: the padded leather one worn smooth by the rub of his grandfather’s breeches, and the hard wooden stool for Ned, the apprentice. He sees the tools, suspended from hooks on the wall above the work bench. He is able to identify those for cutting, those for stretching, those for pinning and stitching. He sees that the narrower of the glove stretchers—used for women—is out of place, left on the bench where Ned works with bent head and curved shoulders and anxious, nimble fingers. Hamnet knows that his grandfather needs little provocation to yell at the boy, perhaps worse, so he picks up the glove stretcher, weighing its warm wooden heft, and replaces it on its hook.
He is just about to slide out the drawer where the twists of thread are kept, and the boxes of buttons—carefully, carefully, because he knows the drawer will squeak—when a noise, a slight shifting or scraping, reaches his ears.
Within seconds, Hamnet has darted out, along the passageway and into the yard. His task returns to him. What is he doing, fiddling in the workshop? His sister is unwell: he is meant to be finding someone to help.
He bangs open, one by one, the doors to the cookhouse, the brewhouse, the washhouse. All of them empty, their interiors dark and cool. He calls out again, slightly hoarse this time, his throat scraped with the shouting. He leans against the cookhouse wall and kicks at a nutshell, sending it skittering across the yard. He is utterly confounded to be so alone. Someone ought to be here; someone always is here. Where can they be? What must he do? How can they all be out? How can his mother and grandmother not be in the house, as they usually are, heaving open the doors of the oven, stirring a pot over the fire? He stands in the yard, looking about himself, at the door to the passageway, at the door to the brewhouse, at the door to their apartment. Where should he go? Whom should he call on for help? And where is everyone?
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First American Edition (July 21, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525657606
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525657606
- Item Weight : 1.39 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.65 x 1.3 x 9.57 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #50,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #164 in Biographical Historical Fiction
- #1,364 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #4,027 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Maggie O’Farrell, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of HAMNET, Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include AFTER YOU’D GONE, MY LOVER’S LOVER, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE and THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT. She is also the author of two books for children, WHERE SNOW ANGELS GO and THE BOY WHO LOST HIS SPARK. She lives in Edinburgh.
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While this book won untold numbers of awards and has many other 5 and 4-star ratings, I am frustrated by the number of reviews that say "This book was slow!" or "This book was boring!" Those readers are certainly owed their opinions, and I'm not here to question them, but I don't know that those readers understand what kind of novel this is. It's not your page-turner. It's not your heart-burner. But what it is, is something very different and very special.
While I would not call myself a Shakespeare scholar, I would confidently call myself a Shakespeare student. I studied his works very extensively in college and have acted in some of his plays. Any serious study of Shakespeare begins with an introduction to his life. And for someone as famous as he, with works as immortal as his, the details of his life are frustratingly scanty.
*SPOILER ALERT*
I think most people who know anything about Shakespeare know that his son Hamnet died, and Hamnet's death was a deciding, changing factor in Shakespeare's life, for good or ill. And no one knows for sure Hamnet's cause of death. And most people who have studied Shakespeare also know that his marriage with Anne/Agnes (I have read that at this point in history, those names were largely interchangeable) was largely spent apart from each other and seems to have deteriorated for reasons unknown to time. We know she was a few years older than he; we know that she was almost certainly pregnant with their first child at the time of their marriage. The rest of the details, no one knows.
This is a brilliant attempt not at imagining him, but imagining her. The wife of a writer so immortal that his works are still being read, interpreted, made into films and other works of art, and reimagined in different eras, 500 years on -- but who was she? And has history ever really cared?
"Hamnet" imagines her as a child of nature -- also a psychic and, in a way, according to the views of the times, a witch. She's clearly smitten by him, and vice versa, and I find that very believable, considering that in real life, they came from different social stations, and one must only speculate what drove them together so powerfully in the beginning of their relationship.
In the novel, she gives up much of her own free thinking, and her own lifestyle, and her kestrel, and other things that make her happy, out of love of this man. I would ask, what woman of the late 16th century did not? If you were a woman of this era, no matter how much you loved the man you married (and I would argue that most marriages of this time did not feature love, so you probably didn't love him at all), marriage meant the death of you as to whoever was you, whoever was the individual you were before. Among many, many other things, I think "Hamnet" is an incredible exploration of that, emotionally.
And it's a shattering, unbelievably intimate and emotionally descriptive dive into the gradual disintegration of a marriage based on the horror and heartbreak of the loss of a mutually loved child.
The fact that Shakespeare's first name -- or that his name in general -- is never used, to me is a stroke of art. It implies that the reader knows who HE is ... doesn't everyone? It is an introspection of a woman NO ONE knows, and he is a supporting character -- yet, brilliantly, at the same time, he is the main character. Because the planets circled him, not her. He's portrayed as self-absorbed and troubled and needy -- and at least in my own imagination, I can see him being all of those things.
If my review henceforth hasn't made this clear, I thought this was a brilliant book. Yes, it IS slow at times. But sometimes with "slow," you just have to stop and smell the roses. And this book has many, many roses. And people who don't have time to smell the roses when it comes to literature just need to go read something else, rather than criticizing works like this. Amazon's full of beach reads -- go find one.
Agnes is my favorite character. She is a herbalist and a healer, a naturalist and a seer. I loved her relationship with nature, her bees, her kestrel. Agnes is no stranger to death and her concept of death/the afterlife as a room on a moor was haunting.
If you like a fast paced story, this may not be for you. Maggie O’Farrell has the amazing ability to describe small moments in such amazing detail with awe-inspiring prose.
The scenes that stand out are:
the love scene in the apple shed, the pain and exhaustion of child birth and the following post delivery recovery. There are three beautifully written pages on parting, and a detailed chapter on the plague’s origin and journey to London.
Maggie O’Farrell writes about death and grief like no other. She captures the numbness and the inability to move forward in every day life. The devastation and emptiness of life going on while someone you loved is dying behind closed doors. These sentiments resonated with me having experienced hospice care of a loved one in their home.
The author writes of the powerful connection between twins, between birth and death. Even though Hamnet is a heavy read, the beauty of the prose and Audible narration made it an incredible reading experience.
Thus, people who know Shakespeare's basic biography are not apt to quibble about his career decisions.
Instead, I became fascinated with Agnes. Knowing in advance only the story of her pregnancy prior to wedlock and her receipt of the "2nd-best bed" after her husband's death, I began to understand the dynamics of Shakespeare's boyhood and his ill repute as a young man as he struggles to find a way out of the drudgery of village life.
O'Farrell gives Agnes the characteristics of a rebel, a woman of strong will and strong talents. She can turn her back of customs to marry a man she loves. She is the center of her children's world though they know she is as likely to be off in the woods gathering medicinal roots as to be cooking in the kitchen. Agnes uses her fey abilities to heal, to comfort, and as necessary, to deceive.
The magic of this book goes beyond the literal magic potions conjured in Agnes's kitchen. The relationship between twins Hamnet and Judith is spun out even as Judith falls desperately ill. They are much like modern twins in their twinship with the added element of shock that they have lived beyond infancy to tell their stories in an Elizabethan world full of death, dirt, squalor, and malnutrition.
This too, imparting the setting, is part of O'Farrell's strength. She never uses a single word or phrase when she can add a catalog. Here is an example of the prose poem style: "Then the door bangs behind her and he is alone, with the falcon, with the apples, with the smell of wood and autumn, with the dry-feathered meaty smell of the bird."
Among reviews I read after finishing this book, this kind of description was widely decried as "impossible" and "boring." Alas. I understand that many readers have little time to read. They want story and action, and they want it now, delivered in the staccato rhythms of texting on a phone.
However, for people with time to read and luxuriate in the sensory images, HAMNET is more than a story of a famous family, more than a historical novel. It is a re-creation of a prior world, one of magic, hope, love, and deep profound grief. Agnes walks through the stages of grief in the final chapter with such clarity and heart-breaking depth, I was left breathless.
HAMNET may never earn the renown of Shakespeare's HAMLET, but it is truly as profound and as beautiful. To me.
Top reviews from other countries
Genre - Historical Fiction
I have to start by saying most books that receive many awards don't usually live upto expectations, personally speaking ofcourse. But this brilliant piece of work, thwarted my preconceived notions completely. From the very first scene, it had me engaged completely. This is a story drawn from Shakespeare's famous play Hamlet. It focuses on Agnes (Shakespeare's wife) their marriage and about a sudden loss of their child - Hamlet.
The chapters are narrated in two alternate eras.The third person narration was impeccable storytelling. It immediately made me dive into the story, more so 'cause it reminded me of Charles Dickens style. The idea of not mentioning 'the husband's name throughout, inspired me as an author.
The characters were most intriguing part for me. The father son relationship between Shakespeare and his father was fascinating.I mean who doesn't want to imagine Shakespeare's personal relationships, right? The relationship he shared with his mother, sister and his brothers.
Agnes - I could literally feel myself in Agnes's flesh, each time she yearned for her child, tried to protect her children and fought for the love of her famous husband.
The author also created an element of mystery for Agnes and that coloured the character even more brighter for me.
This is a story about relationships, loss, grief, death and it is so much in touch with present times. The angst and pain the parents go through together and individually was expressed just right. The ending wraps up just right with just two words that tugs the heart 'Remember Me.' A novel I recommend to all - a must read.
I think of the first two parts of the book (it has three), as if I was in the middle of a double helix (as the DNA strand). In one side is the story of Hamnet's birth and in the other is the story of Hamnet's death. And the helix is constantly moving from one side to the other in a constant swirl that peaks at the moment in which life and death are happening. As I said very clever.
At some point, the story made me remember the start of 100 Years of Solitude. With the time shifting in the life of Coronel Buendia from one period to another in Macondo. But do not get me wrong. This is not a magical realism novel, nor it intents to be. It is a novel in which a great story is being told with full control of the author. It shows an author in full control of its trade and this is always welcome news to us readers.
So please, stop reading this commentary and read the book.