AN award-winning novel based around the death of William Shakespeare’s son was the most-borrowed book from Camden’s libraries during the pandemic.

While the opportunities to take books out were limited as libraries were forced to close for long periods, catalogue figures show that Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet was the most requested since last March.

Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596 when he was 11 and scholars have often argued whether the tragedy influenced a move towards darker works and the classic play bearing an almost identical name, Hamlet. But, Ms O’Farrell, who won last year’s prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction for the book, imagines the effect of Hamnet’s death on his twin sister Judith and the bard’s wife, Anne Hathaway.

Hamnet

The second most-borrowed book from Camden’s libraries over the past year was Booker prizewinner Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart – an acclaimed work about a boy growing up with an alcoholic mother in Glasgow.

The top five loans list is completed by Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara And The Sun; former US president Barack Obama’s A Promised Land and Ian Rankin’s A Song For Dark Times.

The lists were released after freedom of information requests to the council. They also show that George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 is one of the most “stolen” books from the service.

Four copies each of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Orwell’s story about big brother surveillance are considered missing. Meanwhile, nearly £10,000 worth a books are currently bracketed “long overdue” on the system.