A review by madtraveler
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

5.0

Quite the way to start the New Year. Phenomenal writing. The long passages of the loss of a child are heartbreaking, the sort of reading you feel in your gut, and words that may move you to tears. Agnes (Anne Hathaway's likely real first name according to her father's will) is a fascinating, woman of the earth type, a healer and empath with preternatural senses about people and the natural world. Never afraid to march to her own drum, she's whispered about by the neighbors and the in-laws. The plague segments, especially the literary version of contact tracing, are all too relevant to real life at the moment. Not to be lost in the story of loss is the perspective of a wife left behind while the husband pursues a greatness we know even centuries later, a situation that seems almost cruel in the moment. O'Farrell puts you in the village of Elizabethan times and makes everyday life and suffering the focus, even unto Shakespeare's work. What a great book!