The Book Review28 Nov 2025

Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Hamnet'

History has not graced us with many details about Shakespeare as a person, but we do know that he and his wife had three children, including a son named Hamnet who died at the age of 11 in 1596, four years before Shakespeare went on to write his great tragedy “Hamlet.”

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel “Hamnet” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020, and the source of Chloé Zhao’s new movie of the same name — starts from those scant facts, and spins them into a powerful story of grief, art and family steeped in the textures of late-16th-century life.

In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, host MJ Franklin discusses “Hamnet” with his colleagues Leah Greenblatt, Jennifer Harlan and Sarah Lyall.

Other works mentioned in this podcast:

“Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “The Winter’s Tale,” by William Shakespeare

“Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott

“Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter

“Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders

“Fi,” by Alexandra Fuller

“Things In Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li

“The Accidental Tourist,” by Anne Tyler

“Will in the World” and “Dark Renaissance,” by Stephen Greenblatt

“Gabriel,” by Edward Hirsch

“Once More We Saw Stars,” by Jayson Greene

“The Dutch House,” by Ann Patchett

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