Hamnet

By: Maggie O'Farrell

Narrated by: Jessie Buckley

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • Now a major motion picture starring ACADEMY AWARD® winner Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn, directed by Chloé Zhao.

The acclaimed author of the Reese's Book Club pick The Marriage Portrait delivers a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the production of his great play Hamlet.

"Miraculous. . . . Brilliant. . . . A novel told with the urgency of a whispered prayer—or curse. . . . A richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.

A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. 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 just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

So emotional!

I can’t believe how alive the book became after listening to this version, I read it when it first was published and am stunned at impact this reading had on me.

Beautifically Tragic

So tragic, yet beautiful and stunningly descriptive... Made more engaging by a great vocal performance of Jessie Buckley, Wonderfully done! It just took me a minute to realize they were going back and forth in time but otherwise I devoured it in a day and a half.

The incredible prose of Maggie is breathtaking.

I love every word, sentences gloriously describe a fictional history, she also captured within fiction, incredible detail and description of the real history.

Maggi’s idle reflections are

The structure of the novel

Absolutely brilliant. The way the play Hamlet is woven throughout the novel and the final recognition of the father’s grief through the play. Well written. Well spoken. Thank you.

The performance was perfection.

Jessie Buckley is a dream. The book was amazing, but her reading made it an incredible experience. 10/10 Absolutely recommend this book with Jessie Buckley reading it to anyone and everyone.