Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell reconstructs a sixteenth-century Warwickshire household around the fever that takes a boy, moving between the weeks before his death and the marriage that must absorb it. The narrative stays close to Agnes, a herbalist and healer whose intuition cannot reach the one loss she most needs to prevent, and whose husband is largely absent in London.

Their bereavement runs on separate tracks: she keeps vigil over the body and the house, he channels the wound into work, and the distance between these two forms of mourning becomes its own strain on the bond. The writing attends to the physical labour of grief, the laying out, the milk that still comes, the sibling left behind.

For a therapist, the value lies in how precisely the book renders parental loss without softening it, and how a couple can love each other while grieving in ways that fail to meet. It also traces the slow passage from raw sorrow to something a person can make and hand to others.