Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell · 2020
The death of Shakespeare's son as experienced by his wife Agnes. O'Farrell writes grief, plague, and marriage in Elizabethan England with such physical immediacy that the novel feels like it was written this morning. The best historical novel of the decade, and it earns the word "devastating" without melodrama.
The case against
Agnes arrives equipped with a kestrel, herbal gifts, and second sight: the mystical wise woman of a hundred lesser historical novels, written better here but still recognizable. O'Farrell never names Shakespeare, a device that begins as tact and curdles into coyness, and the present-tense lyric prose holds a single elegiac pitch for three hundred pages.
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