"Hamnet" by Maggie O'Farrell

An audio book.

A boy (young, clever, observant) wanders in a deserted house (his glove-making grandfather's shop/workshop/home). I thought at first he might be a ghost, but no. The old man has bouts of anger. The boy's a twin. His sister Judith is suddenly ill. He's looking for help.

His father is in London. He comes back maybe 5 times a year. His mother, Agnes, deals in herbs and has strong intuitions. Her childhood prophecies sometimes came true.

In an interlude we're told how the plague came from Alexandra via Venice to Stratford.

Agnes came from a land-owning family. She owned a kestrel. She didn't like being at home. Her then boyfriend (a Latin tutor) didn't like his home either. So she had the idea of getting pregnant. She moved from the farm to his family's townhouse. She could see that her now husband was drifting. He wanted to go to London so she let him. She went into the woods to give birth. After their first daughter there were twins. The daughter of the pair (smaller, born second) wasn't expected to survive.

Mother returns to the house, sending word to her husband in London that Judith might not have long. When he returns, Judith is at the door, but her twin brother Hamnet is dead. After the funeral the father has to return to London to cope with his grief. He looks in crowds for Hamnet's face.

He returns back to Stratford after maybe 10 months. He has gifts. Agnes senses he's been with other women. He goes, writing comedies and history plays because he can't yet write tragedies. He buys a big house in Stratford for the family. After 4 years Agnes discovers that he's written a play called Hamlet. She rides to London, finds his little rented room, a letter to her on his desk, barely started (we learn later that Shakespeare had been trying to write to her to explain the play). Then she goes to the theatre. She watches the play (enters his world), trying to understand what the ghost etc has to do with their dead son. She decides to return to Stratford and write him a letter saying it's over, that he's betraying their son's name, diluting it with costumed fools. Then an adolescent appears on stage. Hamlet. He has Hamnet's gestures. Hamlet's scared by the ghost (played by Shakespeare). She heads to the front of the crowd.

Apparently Anne Hatheway was called Agnes in her father's will, and the names Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable. Shakespeare's plays have twin mix-ups.

Other reviews

• Stephanie Merritt (the most famous character in the novel goes unnamed... in their small local sphere it is Agnes who is the celebrity, known in the town for being unconventional, free-spirited, a gifted herbalist who trails rumours of other, stranger gifts. ... There is an elliptical, dreamlike quality to her prose in Hamnet that, though not obviously steeped in 16th-century language, is essential to creating a world that feels at once wholly tangible and somehow otherworldly )
• Geraldine Brooks
• Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (The timeline of the text shifts back and forth between 1596, the year Hamnet dies aged eleven, and the 1580s, tracing the courtship and marriage of Agnes and William, and family life with their three children. It is an exquisitely rendered meditation on motherhood in all its love, joy, and grief, and the miraculous power of art to heal a wounded heart.)
• Robert Allen Papinchak
• Aileen Loftus (As overrated as Shakespeare himself? ... I found the time switches and diversions following far removed characters whimsical and distracting, and wasn’t moved by a death that the entire text builds towards. I did find the second half of the novel more compelling than the first)
• Ron Charles