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.