JCO Book Club

A boy runs through a house in Stratford, searching for someone, anyone, to help his twin sister, who has suddenly fallen ill. It is 1596, and the plague has found its way to their door. Hamnet begins here, not with the famous father who is mostly away in London, but with the child, and with the mother left to hold everything together: Agnes, a healer and herbalist who gathers her plants at the forest's edge and is said to see what others cannot. Maggie O'Farrell tells their story in two braided strands, one moving across years, the other across a single unbearable day, in prose so close and sensory that the house itself seems to breathe. The husband is never once named; he does not need to be. A few years after the boy dies, his father will write a play and give it his son's name: Hamlet. You are welcome…