Review: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020)
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Author: Maggie O’Farrell
Published: 2020 – Tinder Press
Rating: 4/5
Film: Hamnet (2025) dir. Chloé Zhao | Oscar-nominated
Goodreads: Hamnet (2020)
Buy the book: Bookshop.org
I experienced Hamnet in a particular order: book first, then film. And I think that might be the right way to do it. I say this as someone who emerged from the cinema having cried, without exaggeration, for approximately two hours straight despite knowing what was coming.
The film is extraordinary. But the reason it hit me so hard, I am convinced, is what the book does first. I don’t mean the plot – you know the broad shape of the story before you begin, the name gives it away. I mean the characters. Specifically, Agnes, and the feelings she leaves you with.
What Hamnet is actually about
The title is Hamnet. And yes, Hamnet – the young son of a glover’s apprentice and his wife, an unusual woman with a deep knowledge of herbal remedies – is central to the novel. His death, from the bubonic plague, in 1596, is the gravitational pull around which this story orbits.
But this is not really Hamnet’s book. It is Agnes’s.
Agnes’s husband is never named. He appears as a young man, a dreamer who falls in love with a woman who reads the lines of your palm and keeps a kestrel as a pet. He leaves Stratford for London and writes plays. You know who he is, and the deliberate omission of his name is not a trick from O’Farrell, but a statement. The author is saying, quietly but firmly: we already know his story. Here is hers.
O’Farrell is saying, quietly but firmly: we already know his story. Here is hers.
Agnes is one of the most fully realised female characters I have encountered in a long time. She is strange and yet she is knowable. She is not easy to live with, she is flawed, but she is entirely comprehensible. She grieves in a way that isolates her from everyone around her, and you understand exactly why, and you cannot look away.
On reading Hamnet slowly
This is not a fast-paced book. O’Farrell writes in long, looping, deeply sensory sentences. The world of sixteenth-century Stratford is rendered in texture and smell and season.
I read this book across two weeks in December. I curled up with it on long, frosty evenings and took it in slowly. I think this pacing was right. Hamnet is a book that needs space between sessions. The grief is long and lasting, and rushing it dulls the slow, devastating way it takes hold.
There is a chapter – I will not say which one – that caused me to put the book down and sit for a while before I could continue.
The book and the film
I went to see the film with my friends not long after finishing the book. We were meant to see Zootopia 2, but it was sold out, so we settled on Hamnet. And what a change of tune that was. The five of us stayed in our seats for at least twenty minutes after the film had ended and the lights had come on, sobbing to ourselves and to each other.
The film is visually stunning and emotionally devastating, and Chloé Zhao did a fantastic job bringing the characters to life (as did Jessie Buckley, of course, and Jacobi Jupe who gave an equally outstanding performance). But it is in the nature of film adaptations to compress and to choose. Characters who have whole chapters to breathe on the page must make their interior lives known in a glance, a gesture, a single line. Knowing Agnes from the book meant I could read every scene she was in with a depth that the film alone could not have given me.
I understood why Agnes made the choices she made. I understood what she was carrying and the specific texture of her grief. And that understanding made the film even more devastating in the best possible way.
Knowing Agnes from the book meant I could read every scene she was in with a depth that the film alone could not have given me.
I also think – and I say this with full awareness of how unusual it is for me – that I may have enjoyed the film slightly more than the book. Not because the book is anything other than beautiful, but because what O’Farrell has built on the page translates to something visually and emotionally enormous on screen. The film earns its devastation, but the book is what makes you capable of feeling it in full.
My recommendation, then: read the book first. Then go and cry in a cinema.
A few things worth knowing before you start
The timeline moves around. O’Farrell shifts between past and present – the early days of Agnes and her husband’s courtship, and the period surrounding Hamnet’s illness and death. This is not confusing, but it is worth knowing going in, so you settle into the movement rather than resisting it.
The prose is dense in the best way. It is not difficult, but it requires and rewards deep attention. This is not a book to read in five-minute snatches on your phone. Settle in and savour it.
And lastly, prepare yourself. Know that this book will ask something of you emotionally, and that is entirely intentional and entirely worth it.
Read Hamnet if…
- You want a novel that takes its time and trusts you to stay engaged
- You are drawn to the female perspectives that history has largely overlooked
- You want to understand the film more deeply before or after watching it
- You appreciate prose that is sensory and unhurried
- You are not afraid of grief on the page
Think twice if…
- You find non-linear timelines frustrating rather than fascinating
- You prefer plot-driven fiction to character-driven fiction
- You are in a reading slump and need something lighter to ease back in
- You want total historical accuracy with little speculation
Buy the book: Bookshop.org
live slow, read more.
