Historical Fiction · Free kit
Hamnet
In 1590s Stratford-upon-Avon, a forest-raised healer named Agnes builds a life with a restless Latin tutor, their daughter Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith — while he chases a future on London's stages. In the summer of 1596, plague reaches an ordinary English door. Maggie O'Farrell's Women's Prize-winning novel is a sensory portrait of marriage, motherhood, and a boy whose short life would lend its name to a play. A 2025 film followed; this kit is for the book.
“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.”
Complete free book club kit
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Hamnet Icebreakers
Answer in under 30 seconds. These connect to the book’s themes without spoiling the story.
Personality Reveal
1. Are you more forest-person or town-person: do you think better walking among trees, or in a crowded room with talk flying around?
Personality Reveal
2. When something is wrong, do you trust a gut feeling immediately, or do you need the feeling to come with a full paragraph of reasons?
Personality Reveal
3. Are you the one who stays and holds the household together, or the one who has to leave the room to survive a hard season?
Funny & Light
4. What is the most unreasonably specific skill you have that friends treat like a mild superpower (herbs, birds, folding a map, reading a room)?
Funny & Light
5. Have you ever tried to explain a vivid dream to someone and watched their face go completely blank halfway through?
Funny & Light
6. What household job would you outsource forever if you could — and which one would you refuse to give up because you do it "the right way"?
Would You Rather
7. Would you rather have a partner who is brilliant when they are home but gone for months, or ordinary and present every evening?
Would You Rather
8. Would you rather always know when someone you love is about to leave, or never see it coming and stay unburdened until it happens?
Would You Rather
9. Would you rather be the sibling people come to for practical help, or the sibling who always knows how they feel without being told?
Hot Take
10. Hot take: working far from your family for a dream is selfish, even if the dream is real. Agree or disagree?
Hot Take
11. Hot take: making art out of a family's private grief is a tribute, not a betrayal. Agree or disagree?
Hot Take
12. Hot take: intuition is just pattern-recognition we haven't found words for yet — not a mystical gift. Agree or disagree?
Personal Connection
13. Who in your life would you run through an empty house looking for if something went wrong — and do they know that?
Personal Connection
14. When you are grieving, do you want people close and talking, or do you need to go away and come back when you can speak?
Personal Connection
15. What's one ordinary skill a parent or grandparent taught you — cooling soup, crossing a street, reading a sky — that you still hear in their voice?