Books To Read if You Love Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival. Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.

An unforgettable tale, set in 17th-century England, of a village that quarantines itself to arrest the spread of the plague. When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna’s eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian — an enigmatic and volatile man — spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes an unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island. Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. Inspired by the real life of a 16th-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

Discover Toni Morrison’s story of a mother and a daughter — a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. In the 1680s, the slave trade in the Americas was still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

A stunning historical novel that follows the story of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two extraordinary 19th-century fossil hunters who changed the scientific world forever. On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary learns that she has a unique gift: “the eye” to spot ammonites and other fossils no one else can see. Mary soon finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth, a middle-class spinster who shares her passion for scouring the beaches. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty, mutual appreciation, and barely suppressed envy, but ultimately turns out to be their greatest asset.

Here is the story of the Iliad as we’ve never heard it before: in the words of Briseis, Trojan queen and captive of Achilles. Given only a few words in Homer’s epic and largely erased by history, she is nonetheless a pivotal figure in the Trojan War. In these pages, she comes fully to life: wry, watchful, forging connections among her fellow female prisoners even as she is caught between Greece’s two most powerful warriors. Her story pulls back the veil on the thousands of women who lived behind the scenes of the Greek army camp — concubines, nurses, prostitutes, the women who lay out the dead — as gods and mortals spar, and as a legendary war hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion.

The master of the Providence plantation in Barbados gathers his slaves and announces that the king has decreed an end to slavery.  The cries of joy fall silent when he announces that they are no longer his slaves; they are now his apprentices. No one can leave. Freedom is just another name for the life they have always lived. So Rachel runs. Away from Providence, she begins a desperate search to find her children — the five who survived birth and were sold. Are any of them still alive? Rachel has to know. She is driven on by the certainty that a mother cannot be truly free without knowing what has become of her children, even if the answer is more than she can bear.

Jules Moreau’s childhood is shattered after the sudden death of his parents. Enrolled in boarding school where he and his siblings, Marty and Liz, are forced to live apart, the once vivacious and fearless Jules retreats inward, preferring to live within his memories – until he meets Alva, a kindred soul caught in her own grief. Fifteen years pass and the siblings remain strangers to one another, bound by tragedy and struggling to recover the family they once were. A kaleidoscopic family saga told through the fractured lives of the three Moreau siblings, alongside a faltering, recovering love story, The End of Loneliness is a stunning meditation on the power of our memories, of what can be lost and what can never be let go.

Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated.

In post-Arthurian Britain, the wars that once raged between the Saxons and the Britons have finally ceased. Axl and Beatrice, an elderly British couple, set off to visit their son, whom they haven’t seen in years. And, because a strange mist has caused mass amnesia throughout the land, they can scarcely remember anything about him. As they are joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and an illustrious knight, Axl and Beatrice slowly begin to remember the dark and troubled past they all share. By turns savage, suspenseful, and intensely moving, The Buried Giant is a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory.

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter.

Yoshie’s much–loved musician father has died in a suicide pact with an unknown woman. It is only when Yoshie and her mother move to Shimokitazawa, a traditional Tokyo neighborhood of narrow streets, quirky shops, and friendly residents that they can finally start to put their painful past behind them. However, despite their attempts to move forward, Yoshie is haunted by nightmares in which her father is looking for the phone he left behind on the day he died, or on which she is trying — unsuccessfully — to call him. With the lightness of touch and surreal detachment that are the hallmarks of her writing, Banana Yoshimoto shares a life–affirming homage to the healing powers of community, food, and family.

Based on the true story of two Jaffa teenagers, Mother of Strangers follows the daily lives of Subhi, a 15-year-old mechanic, and Shams, the 13-year-old student he hopes to marry one day. With a thriving orange export business, Jaffa had always been a city welcoming to outsiders — the “Mother of Strangers” — where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived peacefully together. Once the bombardment of the city begins in April 1948, Suad Amiry gives us the grim but fascinating details of the shock, panic, and destruc­tion that ensues. Amiry has written a vivid and devastating ac­count of a seminal moment in the history of the Middle East — the beginning of the end of Palestine and a por­trait of a city irrevocably changed.

Amid a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend, who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship, to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories, and to Dong-ho’s own grief-stricken mother, and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life — in good times and bad — that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or child. In a work of electric honesty and passion, Didion explores how we all, somehow, will ourselves to survive. This powerful narrative is Didion’s “attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken is that he is exactly like everyone else. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then, violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends — his memories — Hua turned to writing. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

With humor and heart, Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was 25, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just 60 years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf. Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. A spare and profoundly moving memoir, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.

Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief, and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page — and never without touches of rich, honest humor — Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story.

One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father — a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee — went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief. Those twin experiences form the heart of Lost & Found, a profound meditation on the families that make us and the families we make. Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, and humor about the connections between joy and sorrow — and between us all.