NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief, and a boy whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time. • “Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life ... here is a novel ... so gorgeously written that it transports you." —The Boston Globe 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.

Wow, this was an interesting split book for us. There was a contingent of NUBClub that loved the novel. There was a contingent that thought the first third was great and the book fell off at the end. And then there was another group that felt oppositely -- that the book was hallmark nonsense at first and then got good at the end. A lot of this depended on how you understand the main character Agnes and her role as a healer and seer of the future. The book walked a tightrope on its magically real elements, and it isn't clear whether Agnes actually has any witchy abilities, but even the presence of those hurt the book for some who felt it was cheap to use mystic nature tropes to have Agnes be a powerful woman. On the other hand, the rest of us loved that view of Agnes as a powerful in control figure. We agreed after a lot of debate that the book was basically about Agnes's point of view on her life and by extension the Stratford view of the world during the time Shakespeare lived. In that mission, O'Farrell commits completely and skillfully -- this is a book that looks at Shakespeare's wife in a way that next to eliminates Shakespeare as the historic figure. Everyone agreed that O'Farrell wrote parts of the book well, but which parts depended on who you were. Some people found the beginning cheesy, others found Agnes's grief at her son's death unoriginal (particularly compared to the more interesting grief of the other family members), but everyone found the scenes of Hamnet's death and burial powerful. Ultimately, while we agreed that the book was a study of Agnes's view of the world and the control she had over her own life, we took a lot of different things from it. Was Agnes right in her visions, or was she constantly getting things wrongly? Did Will have affairs, or was that just her jealous grief? Did Hamnet actually trick death into taking him, or was that just the luck of the plague? All of these questions couldn't be answered, but our take on the book was dependent on how sympathetically and believably we viewed Agnes. We also got into a pretty heated debate about speculative fiction and the license that O'Farrell was taking with the plays and (notably very limited) facts of Shakespeare's life. In particular, Agnes's interpretation of the play Hamlet at the end was a contentious point, with some arguing that Agnes's view is a misreading of the play and others arguing it's as valid as any other reading. Not many minds were changed in this discussion, but wow did we find a lot to talk about. It's hard to say whether we would recommend Hamnet to others -- but since at least two of us loved it completely and everyone else found something they liked somewhere, I would say that at worst Hamnet will be a disappointing letdown of whatever version of Agnes you like, and at best, it's a wildly original re-imagining of one of the most important figures in history from a deeply radical feminist lens.