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.