Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, published in 2020, is a work of historical fiction built around the household of William Shakespeare and Agnes Hathaway in Stratford. The novel imagines their meeting in the 1580s, when he is working as a Latin tutor and she is known for her knowledge of herbs, her falconry and her habit of anticipating what other people have not yet realised. It follows their marriage, her move into his family's house, and the years in which he works in the London theatre while she raises their three children largely on her own.

Eleven years later their son Hamnet falls ill. The novel keeps close to the household and to Agnes through the days surrounding his death and the period afterwards, staying with the family rather than with the public life of the playwright. Hamnet Shakespeare was buried on 11 August 1596, the record on which the book's central event rests, and the novel's account of the illness that takes him is a fictional one. In Canada the book was published under the title Hamnet & Judith.

O'Farrell had already published a number of novels before Hamnet appeared in 2020, and the book belongs with her other historical fiction in taking a documented life or record as its starting point.