Maggie O’Farrell’s haunting reimagining of the family behind Shakespeare’s most famous play — told not from his perspective but from that of Agnes, his remarkable wife.

The novel centres on the death of Hamnet, Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, from the plague in 1596, and the grief that rippled outward from it. O’Farrell imagines Agnes as a fierce, wild, almost otherworldly woman — a healer, a keeper of hawks — and the book is really her story as much as Hamnet’s. It is beautifully written, devastating in places, and tender throughout.

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.

The film — Jessie Buckley is extraordinary as Agnes, and Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare. I loved it so much. It captures the book’s atmosphere perfectly — the grief, the strangeness, the love. And the Hans Zimmer soundtrack is incredible; it stays with you long after the credits roll.