I’ll bet your  2020 summer reading list looked a lot like mine.  Last year, when I wasn’t reading about the science of viruses, I wanted pure escapism.  I read lots of novels set abroad, I read science fiction set in other worlds and I read genre fiction set in another time.

But somehow I missed the incomparable Maggie O’Farrell’s novel “Hamnet” and now that it’s out in paperback, you simply must read it this summer. Here’s why:

In doing what sounds like prodigious research on Shakespeare, O’Farrell spotted references to the birth and death of Hamnet, the son that Shakespeare and his wife, Ann Hathaway, would lose to the black plague. The boy was just 11. Four years later, the playwright would publish “Hamlet,” the story of a father’s death, a son’s grief and his tragic quest for revenge. 

O’Farrell’s novel takes on scholarly historical skepticism that the match between the young playwright who was 18, and Hathaway, who was five or six years older, was a true love match. Hathaway is often portrayed as a cynical older woman who trapped young Will into marrying her because she was pregnant, although as O’Farrell notes, the “trapping theme” is all conjecture. No documentation exists to support that.

Instead, we’re treated to the passionate affair that begins between Shakespeare and Hathaway, their marriage, their children, and the gathering storm that is the bubonic plague.  O’Farrell writes, "For the pestilence to reach Warwicksire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet."

Within months, that “meeting” will unleash a global pandemic and the world will never be the same.

My Thread Must-Read is Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” now out in paperback.