Hamnet

Hamnet by Maggie O’ Farrell
Guest reviewed by Jack
📘📘📘📘📘
⁣⁣
Well… what can I say… I picked up this book and genuinely didn’t put it down and finished it within a day! ⁣
⁣
Hamnet focusses on a marriage between two Warwickshire natives in the later years of the 16th Century and the untimely death of their only son, Hamnet, to the plague. It also happens that the father is the world’s greatest playwright, William Shakespeare. ⁣
⁣
O’Farrell's writing is a real feast and is so deliciously descriptive that you really are swept along in an almost dream-like state through her vivid descriptions of rural life in Tudor Stratford-Upon-Avon. The story does not focus on large themes necessarily, or on the stratospheric career of the father but is a tale told through the minute moments of human physical and emotional existence and of family life. If there is a theme that acts as bedrock in the book it is of transience, of change, for better and worse. ⁣
⁣
It is a vast story told in flashes of memory, a novel guided by an omnipotent narrator who takes us across times and persons seamlessly. When the inevitable death of young Hamnet occurs O’Farrell’s descriptions of grief and loss are devastating, precise, and agonisingly beautiful. ⁣
⁣
This will feature as a favourite for many years to come!