Maggie O'farrell
O'Farrell wrote eight novels before Hamnet won the Women's Prize and made her name a household one. The Marriage Portrait was the follow-up. Both are great. The earlier work is what made the later work possible, and most of it is better than anyone tells you.
Where to actually start
Skip the chronological order. Start with Hamnet — it's the book that will tell you whether you'll like her at all. About £9 in paperback. If the writing connects, go backwards through the catalogue.
Then read The Marriage Portrait. It's the more ambitious book — a 16th-century Florentine duchess, a likely-murder mystery, a wedding portrait that may be the painting that killed her. About £10 paperback.
The early novels worth backtracking to: After You'd Gone (her debut, still one of her best), The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (the one most people skip and shouldn't), and Instructions for a Heatwave (the family-drama one).
The memoir
I Am, I Am, I Am is the memoir that tells you why O'Farrell can write the way she does. Seventeen brushes with death — hers, her daughter's, near-misses she only told her husband about decades later. The I Am, I Am, I Am paperback is about £9. Read it after Hamnet.
The reading setup
O'Farrell is one of those writers who rewards a proper reading routine. A Kindle Paperwhite at £150 is fine. The hardbacks are designed objects worth owning, particularly the Hamnet UK first edition with the dust jacket by Suzanne Dean.
For audiobooks, the Hamnet and Marriage Portrait audio narrations are excellent. The Audible subscription at £8/month gets you both.
If you read in bed: a clip-on book light at £20 outlasts the bedside lamp by a decade and the warm-light versions are easier on the eyes.
If you like Hamnet
The historical-fiction adjacent stack: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy is the obvious next step — Mantel's Cromwell does for the Tudor court what O'Farrell did for Shakespeare's family. Around £30 for the boxset.
Ali Smith's seasonal quartet (Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer) operates in a related register and rewards the same kind of patient reader.
The thing about her writing
O'Farrell does close third-person better than almost anyone working now. The trick is restraint. She'll spend pages on a single moment of consciousness and never make it feel like writing. The Marriage Portrait opens with Lucrezia preparing for what may be her last meal. That single scene is twenty pages and it doesn't waste a word.
Read her in big chunks. The novels don't work in ten-minute commute reading sessions — they need an evening at a time.
What to skip
The movie adaptations. Hamnet's adaptation is reportedly in development and historically book adaptations of this calibre disappoint. Read the book first. Always.
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