HAMNET (B PB)

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. But I just loved everything about it including its classy cover. Such an amazing rendering of Hamnet's life. Mind-blowing imagination.

The book is excellent reading

The writing makes you feel every emotion so intensely. It has such a lyrical to feel to it as well. Finished this book in a day and witnessed something extraordinary and magical. Not to forget, a whole lot of pain

This a very enjoyable recreation of Shakespeare's home life that grew from the seed of his completion of the play Hamlet just two years after the death of his son Hamnet. Shakespeare's wife, Agnes in this telling, takes centre stage and is shown as a strong and independent woman who worked as a healer with ties to the Celtic and forest life of old England. The healer is almost totally destroyed by her failure to heal her son, and the marriage almost fails as husband and wife deal in their own separate ways with their grief.

Immaculate writing, just beautiful piece of fiction. It just breaks your heart in tiny pieces, but in a good way.

Vivid intense heart warming and chilling inspiring . A fantastically realistic portrayal of the times the place and the people living in it. The prose transporting one into the world . A difficult to put down book.

A book that does not seem to go anywhere in it's long rambling sentences in it's first 40 to 50 pages mercifully picks up pace thereafter. Be that as it may at the end of the day it did not make a great impression on me. Much of it was a tedious read. It did capture the atmosphere and mores of 16th century England and it's account of how the plague reached Stratford was most engaging. Overall I can at best give it 3 stars.

Beautiful and tender prose, yet not overwhelming. The characters and story stay with you for a long time. The historical setting is not a hurdle to enjoying this. Definitely recommend, irrespective of whether you like historical fiction.

I find Hamnet a difficult book to review. O'Farrell's prose reads like a masterclass in creative writing, with each word, sentence and paragraph, polished to perfection. I realise this sounds counterintuitive, but I found it distracting, and felt it created a barrier between myself and the story. I didn't feel as close to the characters as I should, or care about them as much as I wanted to. As a consequence, reading this book came to feel like a chore rather than a pleasure. The excruciating attention to detail, while impressive, left me somewhat cold. On finishing it, I began reading Richard Ford's new collection of short stories, which helped me understand why I never quite got into Hamnet. Ford's spare but fluid prose left room for me, the reader, to engage my imagination, whereas O'Farrell's exhaustively overworked prose didn't. Hamnet is an impressive feat, hence 4 stars, but the writing demanded too much attention, overshadowing the story and characters.

This is the story of Agnes - pronounced "Anyis", also written as Anne - a 16th-century farmer's daughter, and her marriage to a younger man with few obvious prospects. They make an odd couple for their practical times: she's a gifted herbalist with psychic abilities, more self-assured than a Tudor woman ought to be in public; he's the downtrodden son of a bully, fascinated by language and given to wordy puns. Poetry was even less of a career option in those days than it is now.Married for love, Agnes pregnant, they move into an annex of his father's home where they must share their daily lives with his extended family. Three years later Agnes, pregnant with twins, arranges for her husband to seek his fortunes in London. There he stays, visiting often. Despite their separation, the couple remain close until one of the twins, Hamnet, dies at 11 years old. Grief for their child strains the relationship to breaking point; they grow further apart until, four years later, he publishes his groundbreaking tragedy, "Hamlet". There's a very satisfying resolution.Will Shakespeare is never named. This may be because so very much has already been written about him, and so little about her and their children. Shakespeare left no documentation whatsoever about his personal life - it's a mistake to assume his works are autobiographical and, if he kept diaries, they are lost. Most historians, being male and applying the values of their own times, have filled this void with unkind assumptions about Anne Hathaway. Nobody knows the truth: we are free to imagine alternatives based on historical context.Maggie O'Farrell weaves complex tapestries of short stories, interconnected across time and space, as experienced by each of their characters. Her outstanding strength is the inner lives of women who, for her, are intensely attuned to nature and emotions, with an almost magical ability to see beyond the physical. Her own daughter suffers an extreme allergy syndrome, forcing her to live with the possibility of losing her child at any moment, and she herself endured a childhood brain infection that has left her with neurological issues. The vulnerabilities and sensibilities in her semi-fictional women are everyday realities for this author.While I loved the book and was fully drawn into Agnes's life - I read it in one very long sitting - I felt doubtful about some of it, especially the more 'magical' aspects. Every Tudor housewife was expected to be a competent herbalist, brewer, cheesemaker and more; there was no need to present Agnes's skills as exceptional. They were, though, very superstitious times and a woman of her character would have been viewed as odd, even dangerous.For companion reading with a different approach, I can recommend Germaine Greer's  "Shakespeare's Wife"  - it was one of O'Farrell's sources for factual background. If you aren't so bothered about real events, this is a wonderful, mystical, emotional roller-coaster! "Shakespeare's Wife"

Where do you start a novel in which readers know the titular character is going to die? Maggie O’Farrell chose to begin as eleven-year-old Hamnet is running around town looking for his mother or a doctor or someone – anyone – to tell that his twin sister Judith is ill. She has fever and there are buboes on her neck, a telltale sign of the plague. He can’t find anyone to help so he lies down on the bed beside her. It’s a clever opening. Instantly we’re engaged in the drama.Then we go back to watch the early days of Hamnet’s parents’ courtship. There’s Agnes, the wise, unusual girl who owns a hawk, who understands the properties of herbs, and who can judge a person by gripping between their thumb and forefinger. And Will, the enigmatic Latin tutor who is enchanted by her. Both come from difficult family backgrounds. We can feel the attraction. We’re rooting for them.The writing is delicious. Fruits and flowers, textures and atmospheres are described in sensuous detail that enhances rather than detracts from the story. It’s a joy to read.Maggie O’Farrell never calls Agnes’s husband and Hamnet’s father by the name William Shakespeare. He is ‘the husband’. But of course the portrait of him and the description of his behaviour is informed by our knowledge of his plays and his reputation in history.I’ve read some reviews that criticise the portrayal of Agnes as a wise woman who can see into the future, claiming that this is an overused trope, but for me it is used in an original way. Agnes only has glimpses of what will happen; she doesn’t see the danger stalking her son. She can’t quite tell what her husband will become, although she knows she has to let him pursue his career in London.The novel is compelling as a description of a mother losing a child, but it’s also a fascinating description of a marriage as both parents grieve separately, in their own ways. I’ve read and loved every single Maggie O’Farrell novel, as well as her non-fiction memoir I Am, I Am, so I knew I would love this too. If you haven’t read any of her work yet, Hamnet is a great place to start.

I sorry but I don't understand the reason for this book. It isn't interesting, there is no plot, characters are thinly draw and there is no arc of a drama. I struggled to finish it and most definitely won't be exploring any more of this writer's work. There is a nice quality to the writing but that in itself does not make a novel. Very bored and disappointed. What must the long list be like if this made it to the shortlist?

This is the first book I have read by Maggie O’Farrell, and to be honest although I knew this was coming out months before it did I just passed it by and never tried to see about getting a review copy. Intrigued by why it had got so many good reviews and as the kindle edition was on promo, I thought thus that I would give it a read. I am now glad that I did as this is stunning and well worth a read. The author has taken a piece from the life of Shakespeare that very little is known about. We know of the playwright’s children, and that Judith and Hamnet were twins, we also know who Hamnet was probably named after, but although we know when this boy tragically died aged eleven, we do not know the cause.O’Farrell gives us a cause here and a way that it came about, which adds to the story, but this isn’t really a story of the boy it is a story of love and loss, something which we can all relate to. The first part of this book then is two streams given to us in parallel, we have the story of the family in the present of the story, and also the way that Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, or Agnes as she is called here meet, fall in love and marry. We indeed are never given the name of the playwright as such, but we can all see that it is of course William Shakespeare. The second part of the book is after the death of the son.This is very well written and imagined, with stark prose and a somewhat dreamlike quality. We have the legends surrounding Agnes, who is considered a witch or at least a cunning woman, and how some think she has trapped her husband into marrying her, although others think she could have made a better match. This gives the tale then a peculiar atmosphere, where you feel like something real can happen, but also perhaps something magical, although this is kept very much in the real world.As we all know, and many have experienced it over the years, it does not seem fair that a child can die before its parents, but it happens quite a lot around the world and is always a tragedy. This is here of course, and then there is love in its many forms, such as a husband for his wife and vice versa, and the love that a child has for its sibling, and as we see in the first half it is Hamnet’s love for his twin sister Judith that can be seen as his downfall, as he wants to trick death into leaving his sister alone. This, a simple idea, is really brought to life here, tugging at our heartstrings, and thus is used to good effect. With the love between the parents we see that because of the husband away so much in London and elsewhere, so there is a feeling of separation between the two adults which feels like it can never be repaired after the tragic death, but we see whether this is so as the novel continues.The clever thing I think and that has made so many people enjoy reading this is that although an historical novel as such, apart from the scene setting this feels very personal and close, and thus could have been set in the past or present, and in any place and with any family, giving it an immediacy that you do not obviously normally get with historical novels. This is certainly something that grabs you and holds onto you until the last page, where you are left wanting more.