Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020
The Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the Books Are My Bag Reader's Choice Award
Shortlisted, An Post Novel of the Year
Two extraordinary people. A love that draws them together. A loss that threatens to tear them apart.
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.
About the Author
Maggie O'Farrell is the author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, and eight novels: After You'd Gone, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award, This Must Be the Place, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Novel Award, and Hamnet. She lives in Edinburgh.
Industry Reviews
"A rich imagining of the lives of Shakespeare's family enchants... O'Farrell's remarkable novel bursts with life"
Sunday Telegraph
"Blisteringly brilliant"
Cosmopolitan
