Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
About the Author
Maggie O’Farrell is the author of eight novels: After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place and Hamnet. She lives in Edinburgh.
Praise for Maggie O’Farrell:
‘Unputdownable’ Guardian
‘Impossible not to love’ Irish Times
‘O’Farrell is hard to beat’ Scotsman
‘Deliciously insightful’ Independent
‘Masterful . . . holds you on an exquisite knife-edge’ Marie Claire
‘I was entranced . . . what a brilliant storyteller she is’ Esther Freud, Daily Telegraph
‘Terrific’ Audrey Niffenegger
‘Exquisitely sensual’ Emma Donoghue
‘Beautifully written and thought-provoking’ Grazia Magazine ‘A masterful gift for storytelling’ Observer
‘An entirely encompassing and beautiful read’ Heat
‘Spellbinding’ Barbara Trapido
By Maggie O’Farrell and available from Tinder Press
Fiction
After You’d Gone
My Lover’s Lover
The Distance Between Us
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
The Hand That First Held Mine
Instructions For a Heatwave
This Must Be the Place
Hamnet
Non-Fiction
I Am, I Am, I Am
About the Book
On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.
Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.
Hamnet is a novel inspired by the lost son of a famous playwright. It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage pushed to the brink by grief.
It is also the story of a flea that boards a ship in Alexandria; a kestrel and its mistress; and a glovemaker’s son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. Above all, it is a tender reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.
For Will
Historical note
In the 1580s, a couple living in Henley Street, Stratford, had three children: Susanna, then Hamnet and Judith, who were twins.
The boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven.
Four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet.
He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone.
Hamlet, Act IV, scene v Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Steven Greenblatt, ‘The death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet’， New York Review of Books （21 October 2004）
I
boy is coming down a flight of stairs.
The passage is narrow and twists back on itself. He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud.
Near the bottom, he pauses for a moment, looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs, as is his habit. He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor.
It is a close, windless day in late summer, and the downstairs room is slashed by long strips of light. The sun glowers at him from outside, the windows latticed slabs of yellow, set into the plaster.
He gets up, rubbing his legs. He looks one way, up the stairs; he looks the other, unable to decide which way he should turn.
The room is empty, the fire ruminating in its grate, orange embers below soft, spiralling smoke. His injured kneecaps throb in time with his heartbeat. He stands with one hand resting on the latch of the door to the stairs, the scuffed leather tip of his boot raised, poised for motion, for flight. His hair, light-coloured, almost gold, rises up from his brow in tufts.
There is no one here.
He sighs, drawing in the warm, dusty air and moves through the room, out of the front door and on to the street. The noise of barrows, horses, vendors, people calling to each other, a man hurling a sack from an upper window doesn’t reach him. He wanders along the front of the house and into the neighbouring doorway.
The smell of his grandparents’ home is always the same: a mix of woodsmoke, polish, leather, wool. It is similar yet indefinably different from the adjoining two-roomed apartment, built by his grandfather in a narrow gap next to the larger house, where he lives with his mother and sisters. Sometimes he cannot understand why this might be. The two dwellings are, after all, separated by only a thin wattled wall but the air in each place is of a different ilk, a different scent, a different temperature.