Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell (Tinder Press)

O’Farrell avoids the dry, dusty atmosphere of most historical fiction. She skips the "thee" and "thou" nonsense and goes straight for the throat. The pacing is tight, moving between the heat of a young romance and the clinical chill of a sickroom. Agnes is no trope; she is a woman of dirt and honey, a sharp contrast to her husband’s world of ink and London stages.

The analysis here is simple: fame is a hollow consolation prize for a dead child. While the husband is off becoming a legend, Agnes is the one dealing with the terrifying silence of a household with one less heartbeat. The book handles the supernatural elements with a dry, matter-of-fact tone that makes them feel more like chores than magic.

“A boy is past tense, but a ghost is the present.”

This captures the soul of the work. If you want a biography of Shakespeare, go to a library. If you want to see the wreckage left behind by a man who chose art over his own family’s reality, read this. It’s for the person who knows that behind every "great man" is a woman who actually knows how to keep the fire going.

4/5

If you like this, you'll like:

• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders