Where to Start with Maggie O'Farrell: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Maggie O'Farrell — whether to begin with Hamnet, I Am I Am I Am, or Instructions for a Heatwave. A complete reading guide.
Maggie O’Farrell (born 1972) is the British-Irish novelist and memoirist whose fiction — focused on the domestic and the intimate, on family, grief, and the hidden lives of women — has made her one of the most celebrated British writers of her generation. She won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 for Hamnet, a historical novel set in Elizabethan Stratford-upon-Avon, which also became a major international bestseller. Her earlier fiction — including Instructions for a Heatwave and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am — established her as a writer of exceptional emotional precision; Hamnet demonstrated that she could operate at historical and imaginative scale while retaining all the intimacy of her earlier work.
Where to Start: Hamnet (2020)
The essential O’Farrell — and the novel that revealed the full range of her gifts. Set in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1596, the novel imagines the life and death of Hamnet Shakespeare, the eleven-year-old son of the playwright, and gives its centre of gravity not to the famous father but to his wife, Agnes — a woman who can read futures in hands, who communes with wild birds, who possesses a quality of attention that the people around her find both compelling and unsettling.
The novel is in two halves: the first traces how Agnes and her husband came together; the second follows the death of Hamnet and its aftermath, including the father’s eventual transformation of his grief into one of the greatest works in English literature. O’Farrell never names Shakespeare or Hamlet — a decision of radical restraint that concentrates all the novel’s power on Agnes and her son. Her Women’s Prize-winning best novel.
I Am, I Am, I Am (2017)
O’Farrell’s memoir — and one of the finest of the past decade. Seventeen chapters, each structured around a different occasion on which she came close to death: a childhood illness that damaged her nervous system, an encounter with a man who turned out to be a serial killer, a near-fatal haemorrhage in labour. Together they form a fragmentary autobiography of a life lived in unusual proximity to the body’s fragility — not a narrative of victimhood but an investigation of what it means to survive, repeatedly, and to keep surviving.
The formal invention — near-death as structural principle — is not merely clever; it allows O’Farrell to write about the body and mortality with a directness that conventional memoir cannot achieve. Readable before or after her fiction; it illuminates both.
Instructions for a Heatwave (2013)
O’Farrell’s most tightly constructed contemporary novel — set during the sweltering London summer of 1976, as Robert Riordan walks out to buy a newspaper and disappears, prompting his wife and three adult children to converge on the family home and confront the secrets they have all been keeping from each other. The 1976 heatwave is the perfect structural correlative: as the temperature rises, the pressures that force suppressed truths into the open intensify.
The novel is an ensemble portrait of a family as a system of mutual concealment — each character carrying something the others cannot know — and demonstrates O’Farrell’s range beyond historical fiction. Her most accomplished purely contemporary novel.
The Marriage Portrait (2022)
O’Farrell’s follow-up to Hamnet — another Renaissance-era historical novel, this time set in sixteenth-century Italy and based on the life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, who was married at fifteen to the Duke of Ferrara and died the following year. The novel begins with Lucrezia understanding that she is about to be killed — the reader knows the outcome from the first page — and works backward and forward through her short life. Like Hamnet, it gives a woman who appears in history only as a name and a death a full interior life.
Best read after Hamnet, with which it forms a natural pair.
Reading Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s fiction is distinguished by its emotional precision — its ability to render states of grief, desire, fear, and love with a clarity that does not sentimentalise them — and by its insistence on giving interior life to women whom history has recorded only as objects, mothers, or victims. Her prose is disciplined and exact; her sense of place and period is vivid without being decorative. Begin with Hamnet for the most fully realised and the most celebrated; read I Am, I Am, I Am for the most revelatory account of the sensibility behind the fiction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Maggie O'Farrell?
Hamnet (2020) is the essential starting point — the novel that brought O'Farrell's work to the widest audience and that is, by consensus, her finest achievement to date. Set in Elizabethan Stratford-upon-Avon, it imagines the life and death of Hamnet Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son who died in 1596 — and gives the central role not to Shakespeare himself but to his wife, Agnes (known to history as Anne Hathaway). It won the Women's Prize for Fiction and demonstrated O'Farrell's gifts — for historical imagination, for character, for writing about grief — at their fullest development. I Am, I Am, I Am is the best alternative for readers who want her memoir.
What is Hamnet about?
Hamnet (2020) is set in Elizabethan Stratford-upon-Avon and imagines the life and death of Hamnet Shakespeare, who died in 1596 at the age of eleven, probably from bubonic plague. The novel centres on his mother, Agnes — a woman of unusual gifts who lives in an England in which the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is not clearly drawn — and on her husband, referred to throughout only as 'the father,' who is in London working in the theatre. The novel reconstructs the domestic world of the Shakespeare household with extraordinary vividness and traces, in its second half, the grief that Hamnet's death produced and the question of what his father made of it.
What is I Am, I Am, I Am about?
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017) is O'Farrell's memoir — seventeen chapters, each structured around a different near-death experience, from a childhood illness that nearly killed her to an encounter with a serial killer on a mountain path to medical emergencies in pregnancy. Together the chapters form a fragmentary, non-chronological memoir of a life lived in unusual proximity to death and the body's fragility. The book is formally inventive — the near-death experience as structural principle — and written with the same precision and emotional intelligence O'Farrell brings to her fiction. One of the finest memoirs of the past decade.
Do I need to read Maggie O'Farrell's books in order?
No — O'Farrell's novels are all standalone works and can be read in any order. Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait are both historical novels (Renaissance-era), and both can be read independently of each other. Instructions for a Heatwave and her other contemporary novels are similarly standalone. Most readers recommend beginning with Hamnet as the most immediately compelling and the most fully realised, but any of her novels is a valid entry point.
