Hamnet

In 1596, in a narrow house in Stratford-upon-Avon, an eleven-year-old boy falls ill. His father is away in London; his mother, a healer and keeper of bees named Agnes, is not at home when the fever takes hold. Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet reimagines the short life and death of William Shakespeare's only son — an event that has left barely a trace in the historical record — and the family shattered in its wake.

Moving between two timelines, the novel follows the unlikely courtship of Agnes and the young Latin tutor who will become the most famous writer in the English language, and, years later, the days surrounding their son's death from plague. O'Farrell never names Shakespeare, keeping her gaze fixed on the household he left behind: his wife, his daughters, and the boy whose name would echo, a few years later, in the title of a tragedy.

Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Hamnet is a luminous, deeply felt meditation on marriage, grief, and the way loss transmutes into art.