Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Hamnet'
28 November 2025 - 1 hour 2 minsHistory 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 S...
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