Page Turner’s Book Club: October 2021

This month’s selection is the historical fiction novel Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. This very popular book explores the lives of Shakespeare, his wife Anne Hathaway (in the book called Agnes), and their children.
Interestingly, Shakespeare is never named in the book and is just referred to as “the husband,” “the father,” or the “Latin tutor.” NPR describes the novel as follows: “A tour de force . . . Although more than 400 years have unspooled since Hamnet Shakespeare’s death, the story O’Farrell weaves in this moving novel is timeless and ever-relevant. . . O’Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent’s worst nightmare: the death of a child. . . Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we’ve come to expect of O’Farrell. But with this historical novel she has expanded her repertoire . . . ” The death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet from the plague ravaging the country at the time is said to be the catalyst for his famous play Hamlet. One of the discussion questions (see below), I think is likely to make for a lively discourse among members: “Hamnet was published in 2020, a year of global pandemic. In the middle of her novel, O’Farrell transports us to the Mediterranean Sea, where readers are given a horrific lesson in 16th-century epidemiology. How does the spread of the Bubonic Plague 400 years earlier parallel our own recent experiences with COVID-19?”
Page Turners Book Club consists of three groups. One group meets the fourth Monday afternoon of the month and two groups meet the fourth Thursday of the month.
For information on the Thursday groups, please contact Steve and Ann Morris at samwrsi@cox.net and for the Monday group contact me, Frances, at fozimec@cox.net.
—Frances Ozimec