Relatively little is known about Shakespeare’s immediate family, but we do know he had a son, Hamnet, who died of unknown causes in 1596 at the age of eleven. Maggie O’Farrell places this family tragedy at the heart of her latest novel, imagining that Hamnet fell victim to one of the plague outbreaks that afflicted England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Shakespeare (never named in the novel) isn’t center stage in Hamnet. That places goes to his wife, called Agnes in the novel but more usually referred to as Anne in historical studies. What a creation she is in O’Farrell’s hands! A deeply intuitive, sensitive woman, Agnes is attuned to the natural and spiritual worlds to a degree that makes her an uncomfortable presence for some of her family. The loss of her young son threatens to unhinge her until she joins a performance of her husband’s new play, Hamlet ….

For the less accomplished or less sophisticated writer, the historical novel is a cruelly exposing genre. Rendering a bygone period persuasively is an exercise fraught with risk. It’s not faithfulness to detail that’s usually the problem. In fact, most historical novelists tend to overdo the details, thinking that layer upon layer will be enough to transport the reader to the appropriate era. The real difficulty is drawing a convincing central character that thinks and acts in ways faithful to the age. That’s far harder than it first seems. In a great historical novel (Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell series comes to mind), characters never feel like 21st century people dropped into, for example, the Elizabethan or Victorian worlds. In Hamnet, O’Farrell has given readers a beautifully rounded and believable central character and a deeply moving study of grief.

Walk around any ancient church and you will see the names of the long dead and the long forgotten who hoped for some remembrance by attaching their names to a part of the structure. Soldiers, scholars, saints, politicians – all hoping for a little immortality through their posthumous association with a grand place of worship. It’s not so different from tagging a bus shelter or a subway car or from carving your initials into a favorite tree. Maybe someone will pass by in a hundred or a thousand years and wonder who you were. In a cathedral as old and as beautiful as Winchester, the “graffiti” is a little grander, but it covers almost every surface, carved into elegant monuments, tombstones, glass, and plaques.

Winchester Cathedral’s origins are in the 7th century, but the oldest part of what the visitor sees today is from the church started in 1079 by Bishop Walkelin. To that base generation after generation has added for nearly a thousand years, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that what stands today is such a beautiful, harmonious whole. Winchester has seen it all – wars, plagues, vandalism, and pillage – and stands today, as it has in some form for nearly 1,400 years, as a monument to faith, power, and wealth. Walking the nave and transepts in 2020, as I did earlier this week, means following signs on the ancient floor to keep two meters distant from other visitors and using hand sanitizer provided as you enter the grand west end of the cathedral. The ancient stones and windows have seen it all before. They have seen pandemics come and go. They have watched one generation of visitors following another, each one in turn awed by the scale and beauty. Sic transit gloria mundi, but in Winchester Cathedral the glory passes very slowly indeed.

A detective novel that weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages is, among other things, a declaration of self-confidence by the storyteller. Maintaining the reader’s interest and sustaining the necessary suspense in a story of that length are feats that would test any novelist, even one with the bona fides of J.K. Rowling (writing here under her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith). Does she pull it off? Mostly, yes, but the author or her editor could have pruned the manuscript quite hard without damaging the overall story.

Troubled Blood is the fifth in the Cormoran Strike series and the pattern is well established by now. On this outing Strike and his partner/love interest take on a cold case, the mysterious disappearance more than forty years earlier of a London doctor, Margot Bamborough. It’s a complicated yarn with the usual large parade of potential suspects and, on this occasion, a plot layer of astrological nonsense that I found very irritating. The best part of this series is the central character and his growing affection for his sidekick, Robin Ellacott, so I was pleased to see Galbraith giving plenty of attention to that side of the story. Troubled Blood, like the others in the Strike series, is undemanding, entertaining fodder, and firmly within a distinctively English tradition of whodunits.