Hamnet

ISBN: 9781472223821
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RM49.90
Product Details

Publisher,Tinder Press
Publication Date,
Format, Paperback
Weight, 420 g
No. of Pages,

On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.

Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.

Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

Customer Reviews

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P
Punita Visvanathan

Hamnet

N
Nadirah R
An interesting historical fiction about Hamnet

This was an amazing historical fiction that is purportedly about Hamnet, a certain famous playwright's son, set in the 1590s. I say purportedly because it's really about Hamnet's family and how they deal with the loss of a beloved child.

This is a melancholic and speculative look into how Hamnet's family members dealt with his death, and it's a heart-wrenching one. While it took me a while to warm up to it--due to the jumping timeline and me going into this completely blind and not realizing that this was about Shakespeare's son until I was 100+ pages into it (yes, I'm dumb like that)--I really enjoyed the almost sedate pace. Maggie O'Farrell's writing is lovely and descriptive and sometimes I just took a moment to appreciate how she sets the stage for the next act (ha, get it, ok I'll shut up now). I really liked the way she lets the story unfold, which is evident in that one chapter where she showed how the sickness came to Hamnet's house.

I came out of this absolutely loving Agnes & Bartholomew, so much so that I just went Shakespeare who? Because at the heart of it, I really do think this is a story about Agnes first and foremost, and I loved that, loved that O'Farrell decided to take such an interesting subject to weave a story around her and her more infamous husband. I don't pretend to know if this is an accurate take because I'm not a Shakespeare fangirl. What I do know is that Maggie O'Farrell has done a phenomenal job in portraying Agnes and the rest of the characters here, and I loved this take of what might have happened to the family following Hamnet's death.