Maggie O’Farrell is seductive and shameless. She teases out every plot point and twist; she catches your attention and then makes you read through paragraphs of fine—at times poetic—prose only to reach a resolution that leaves you eager for more. Hamnet is an invented history constructed around a few broken bricks and half-rotted historical facts, and is written to please. The characters come vividly to life: the mysterious Agnes, John, Mary, Bartholomew, Eliza, Susanna, Hamnet, Judith, and Agnes’s never-named husband who leaves his broken family and flees to London where, it is said, he writes and acts in plays. Keep facial tissue at hand.