Hamnet is everywhere right now. Have you read the book? Seen the film? Or the play? Let’s talk!
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell will be the first book we discuss in our 2026 Ruff Reads book club.
Thursday March 26th at 8pm on Zoom
DM us or contact christine@shakespeareintheruff.com for the Zoom link. (Don’t have time to read or watch, but still interested in the conversation? Join us anyway!)
Hamnet (the book) is available as an audiobook or an ebook, through your library, or as a paperback 10% off at our favourite indie Toronto bookshop Queen Books (when you mention Ruff Reads!). And Hamnet (the film) is playing everywhere!
From the publisher:
“A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when their beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.”
About Maggie O’Farrell:MAGGIE O’FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.