Hamnet

Best novel of 2021 according to El País... England, 1580: Agnes, a peculiar girl who seems to answer to no one and who is able to create mysterious remedies with simple combinations of plants, is the talk of Stratford, a small english town. When she meets a young Latin tutor just as extraordinary as her, she quickly realizes that they are called to form a family. But her marriage will be put to the test, first by her relatives and then by an unexpected misfortune. Drawing from the family history of Shakespeare, Maggie O'Farrell travels between fiction and reality to trace a hypnotic recreation of the event that inspired one of the most famous literary works of all time. The author, far from looking only at known facts, tenderly vindicates the unforgettable figures that inhabit the margins of history and delves into the small big questions of any existence: family life, affection, pain and loss. The result is a prodigious novel that has garnered enormous international success and confirms O'Farrell as one of the most brilliant voices in English literature today.