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Hamnet
Shakespeare's son died at eleven and his father never wrote about it. O'Farrell imagined the mother's grief instead. The result is extraordinary.
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Agnes of Stratford
Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 Women's Prize winner follows Agnes, a wild, intuitive woman who marries a young Latin tutor in Stratford in the 1580s, raises three children, and loses her youngest son Hamnet to plague in 1596. Her husband, never named in the novel but clearly William Shakespeare, goes to London and becomes famous. The novel alternates between Agnes's experience of losing Hamnet and the months before the loss, building to a final section in which Agnes attends the London premiere of Hamlet years later and hears her son's name said aloud on the stage. O'Farrell's prose is exact and devastating.


:JOURNEY
Reading Hamnet
3 Present
3 Vivid
4 Relentless
5 Hollow
4 Estranged
5 Transcendent

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Maggie O'Farrell]
She wants to ask: how can you bear it? How do you carry something like this and still stand upright?


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O'Farrell deliberately never names Shakespeare in the novel, referring to him only as the Latin tutor or the father or the husband. She wanted Agnes to be the protagonist, not a figure orbiting a famous man.
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O'Farrell has written about her own experience of nearly dying from encephalitis as a child, and about her daughter's severe anaphylaxis. Grief and mortality are central to almost all her novels.


:LINK
https://www.google.com/search?q=Hamnet+Maggie+O+Farrell+book
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