Hamnet

Stratford-upon-Avon, 1580s–1596. Agnes Hathaway, a gifted healer with an instinctive understanding of plants and people, marries William Shakespeare, a young Latin tutor struggling beneath his father’s authority. While William builds a career in the London theatre, Agnes raises their daughter Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith among the crowded rooms, workshops and gardens of Henley Street. Distance, money and ambition strain the household, but the family remains bound by Agnes’s fierce devotion to her children.

When plague enters the town and one of the twins falls ill, eleven-year-old Hamnet is caught at the centre of a catastrophe that transforms every member of the family. The novel imagines the private grief behind the historical record, shifting attention from the celebrated playwright to his wife and children and tracing how bereavement, marriage and artistic creation become entangled in the years before Hamlet reaches the stage.