“On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week”. These are the opening lines of the blurb of the historical novel by the Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell.
Hamnet, written in 2020, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was named Waterstones’ Book of the Year. The novel focuses on the short life of Shakespeare’s only son, who died from the plague.
According to inews, Maggie believes that her writing skills were strongly influenced by a near-death experience in childhood: at the age of eight, she almost died of encephalitis. Once, while lying in the hospital, she heard the doctors discussing her imminent death, but she was sure that they were talking about another girl. And she “felt foolish” when she realized that it was her own self who was the subject of their discussion.
“I’ve always felt my life is a sort of bonus, that I was partly living on borrowed time or I had slightly cheated the universe in a way so I was going to live the biggest and best life I possible could”, the writer said.
Near-death experiences are often a kind of phase state (by this term we mean lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences) and can often be a turning point in people’s lives. Many of those who had miraculously woken up after a coma or clinical death claim that they then chosen a radically new path for the rest of their lives. Maggie confirms: “Any brush with mortality does change you I think. You come back from the brink a different person every time”.
The novel Hamnet is available on Amazon.
