I cannot remember being so moved by a novel in recent memory. Hamnet is a beautiful, masterful, meaningful exploration of family and marriage and grief, populated by characters that jump off the page and into the reader's heart. The novel follows William Shakespeare (though he is never named as such, instead being called husband, father, playwright, etc, allowing the reader to bring their own knowledge of the man to the text without the legend overwhelming the story) his wife Agnes, their three children and their respective families, from William and Agnes's meeting through the death of their son and the staging of Hamlet. Despite knowing the eventual outcome the page crackles with tension and the intensity of love and loss building between each character. There is not a word out of place here, each sentence used to build a profile of a time and place and its people that is so vibrant it is as if it is unfolding on stage before you. Gorgeous and unputdownable.

Hamnet is at the top of my best of the year. The Elizabethan background subtly flavored the book naturally, never feeling like a data dump but illuminating the characters and plot. Everything in this novel approached perfection. All the characters had the feel of reality, making the slight touches of the supernatural work with the down to earth description of daily life.
Shakespeare is present throughout the book, but the women in his life dominate the plot, as I read in the back of my mind was the fact that this man was perhaps the most important cultural figure in the western world.. the end brought Shakespeare to the place he has always occupied and resolved he personal and public strands.
I have read and enjoyed several books by Maggie O’Farrell but this rises far above her previous novels.

A profoundly moving and finely observed character study of Shakespeare's wife, moved from the margins to the center of the tale. O'Farrell's imaginative reconstruction of Shakespeare's marriage and family life in Stratford pushes him to the novel's periphery (he's never named directly, only referred to as "the Latin teacher" and "her husband"). Admirably, O'Farrell portrays him as a deeply flawed male human being and physically and mentally absent husband and father, and his literary achievements are almost entirely relegated offstage. That is, until the very end of the novel, which collapses real life and fiction, (perhaps?) redeeming grief through art.Winningly, O'Farrell provides few explicit parallels between Shakespeare's plays and his home life, only ambiguous and elliptical connections.

Instead, O'Farrell focuses the novel on a nuanced and multi-layered exploration of the psychological worlds of his wife (here named Agnes rather than Anne Hathaway), and, to a lesser extent, his children. The first two-thirds of the novel alternate chapters that shift between the past and present of Agnes's domestic life, recording her courtship and marriage in counterpoint with her reactions to the plague that threatens the lives of their twins, Judith and Hamnet. O'Farrell writes beautifully immersive scenes of farm life, and tense moments of household conflict, as Agnes lurches between two worlds: her wild girlhood in the woods and the trappings of bourgeois domesticity in Stratford.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for providing an ARC of this novel in exchange for an unbiased review.