In 1596, eleven-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare died. Four years later, his father wrote one of his most famous plays, a tragic ghost story. From those scant facts (and a few more), Maggie O'Farrell creates this lush, mesmerizing novel about a young tutor in Stratford-Upon-Avon who falls in love with a beguiling older woman before moving to London and discovering the theater. It's a story about love—between a husband and wife, between parents and their children—and about grief. And though it takes place in rural England, with the Black Plague ravaging the country, Hamnet feel fresh, immediate, and hopeful: a historical novel befitting its famous subject.