Hamnet depicts the loving and modern relationship between a dashing young man whose father thinks he'll probably do nothing in his life because he refuses to show the slightest interest in the glove business and his wife, Agnes, an older illiterate farmer's daughter, mistress of the power of plants and flowers, close to the natural world.
They have three children, a girl, Susanna and twins, Hamnet and Judith.
When Judith falls ill, the whole family fails to see her brother's health is rapidly declining and as Agnes is looking after her dying son, she hopes her husband, now a famous playwright in London, will be back before Hamnet passes away.
But in the late 16th century England, letters ride horses and London is a long way from Stratford-upon-Avon.
The boy's mother, his sisters, his grand-parents and his father will then learn to grieve each their own way until the day comes when Agnes is told about her husband's new play soon to be performed at the Globe Theatre.
Maggie O'Farrell makes the reader smell and feel the rooms, the houses, the streets, the fields, the woods and gardens through Agnes's intimate and somewhat magical knowledge of plants and flowers.
Her deeply moving novel leads you to sense the boy's vanishing presence the women of the house have to come to terms with; and while their son's death is just a name and a date in a parish book, the author sensuously imagines what Agnes and her family may have experienced after Hamnet's death.
O'Farrell never uses the name we all have in mind, maybe because his is a universal story of loss and grief.
My favourite sentence (Agnes's future husband describing her to his sister Eliza) : "She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be."
Listen to the interview of Mrs O'Farrell in Desert Island Discs on BBC 4.