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I'm clearly in a minority here (again!) but I found this unengaging and flat. There's too much indirect speech and the whole story feels very distanced rather than immediate. O'Farrell talks in the foreword about how she's wanted to write this book for decades, and the result is that it feels laboured, weighted down with expectation that doesn't come to fruition for me.

I especially hated the portrayal of Agnes as one of those almost witchy 'wise women' who abound in historical fiction: fey, with preternatural senses, a herbalist as a code for 'female' power... it's very predictable, very common, very Philippa Gregory!

The vaunted connection to Shakespeare is tangential at best, and the idea that the death of Hamnet illuminates the writing of 'Hamlet' is sparse. The claim made in the novel that Shakespeare was so traumatised that he never wrote about plague is not quite true: 'Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood' (King Lear); 'A plague on both your houses' (Romeo & Juliet) are just a couple of examples. It is the case that censors at the time wouldn't let naturalistic representations of the plague pass (playhouses were one of the first public spaces to be closed when outbreaks occurred) but that applies to all Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists and is a structural limitation rather than an indication of personal grief.

A book which is not for me, then, but clearly other reviewers have loved it.