Hamnet

By: Maggie O'Farrell

Narrated by: Ell Potter

Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “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

In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

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 taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

Don’t miss Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, The Marriage Portrait!

©2020 Maggie O'Farrell (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • One of Bill Gates's Favorite Books of the Year • Book Club Pick: Duchess Camilla Parker Bowles’ The Reading Room

"O'Farrell has a melodic relationship to language. There is a poetic cadence to her writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world. . . . We can smell the tang of the various new leathers in the glover's workshop, the fragrance of the apples racked a finger-width apart in the winter storage shed. . . . As the book unfolds, it brings its story to a tender and ultimately hopeful conclusion: that even the greatest grief, the most damaged marriage, and most shattered heart might find some solace, some healing."—Geraldine Brooks, the New York Times Book Review

"Magnificent and searing. . . . A family saga so bursting with life, touched by magic, and anchored in affection. . . . Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life, about whether he even wrote his own plays, here is a novel that matches him with a woman overwhelmingly more than worthy."—The Boston Globe

"A tour de force. . . . Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages—from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell."—NPR

Hamnet

Narrator was excellent. She added so much to the story. I plan to do some research on the play “Hamlet”

Near Every Line is Poetry

This is the best novel I have read in a long time. It is so moving and beautiful that I am convinced Agnes’ ghost haunted the author until she wrote her story. Readers may find their heart wrenches as they listen/read page after page. And yet it feels like the least one can do. I find poems about grief, betrayal, love scattered throughout, and I want to copy those lines so as to read them again and again, to share them with friends who struggle with these emotions. And I appreciate the writing in present tense that places readers in the middle of every scene. And we see Agnes’ husband as a tutor, a son, a lover, a father, a disappointment to his father, children, and wife, a tormented playwright, a selfish success, and we all know his name without finding it in the pages of this gorgeous novel.

exquisite

Hamnet is like an extended prose poem, plumbing the depth of every sensory moment - brilliantly performed - a great listening experience, enriched by repetition - a keeper for my audio library for sure

“She wondered which words he would choose.”

Wow! All manners of things said and those unable to say. Give it to the very end. It’s beautiful, Bravo!

Hamnet

A moving fictional story of Shakespeare and his family life. Interesting character development and like Ken Follett’s a glimpse into life in the 1600’s. Some historical anomalies but a good read!

Love

Loved this book. Great Narrator!The story has inspired me to read Shakespeare . The authors description is so lovely brought the story to life!

tremendous read!

Fantastic writing and gripping story. I didn't want the book to stop. Great narration.

Wonderful Imagining

Loved the story and the narration. Couldn't stop listening. Perfect combination of history and imagination.

Fantastic Imagining of Shakespeare's Life

Terrific story narrated by a lyrícal voice. One of the best books I've read/listened to this year.

Great story; writing style can get tiresome

I am enjoying this novel's narrative, its imagination, its subjects, and its reader's performance a great deal.

This is only a personal opinion, based on style, entirely subjective, and certainly will not be shared by everyone, but I find O'Farrell's tendency--her proclivity, her urges, her earnestness, her carried-awayness--to include lists, chains of thoughts, detail, more detail, details that run on and on, to be colorful and often quite lush and beautiful, but the frequency of this style of sentence takes me out of the narrative and, unfortunately, has become quite tiresome to listen to. I think I might have been (slightly) less irked by this quality of O'Farrell's writing had I read the novel rather than listening to it. The reader's performance is a delight to listen to, but the dramatic and excitable tone in her voice calls attention to these lists, and I do wish that many of the details had been paired down. O'Farrell's writing is beautiful; I just wish that she had used this style a little more judiciously, which for me would have made a greater impact.

Otherwise, I enjoy the imagination within this magical private life of Shakespeare's family.