Campaign for the American Reader: Five top Shakespeare-inspired novels

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

Five top Shakespeare-inspired novels

Rebecca Fallon is a New England-born Londoner and a graduate of Williams College and the University of Oxford.

Family Drama is her debut novel.

At Lit Hub she tagged five titles that make for:

a masterclass in how to steal from Shakespeare, featuring some world-class thieves. Each story contains shades of its foundation. All deal in Shakespeare’s timeless themes of power and family, loss and love. All strike at the most profound elements of life. But each also departs in truly original ways, allowing the author to express something honest and new through the conversation with the source.

One novel on the list:

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Station Eleven opens with a Toronto-based production of Lear starring the famous actor, Arthur Leander. Leander is Lear-like offstage as well; his life is defined by three women, “a series of failed marriages,” that leave him regretful and unsure of who loves him and how much. On the night he has a heart attack onstage, a curtain falls over the whole world as a highly contagious flu becomes a full-blown pandemic. In the ensuing chaos, North America comes to resemble Lear’s Britain: a society without order or leadership, defined by acts of arbitrary justice and violence. Both texts wonder, who will inherit this “gored state?” But for Mandel’s characters, apocalypse is only the beginning.

Twenty-years after the catastrophe, one young actor from Leander’s last production, Kirsten Raymonde, takes on the role of Cordelia within a roaming theatre troupe. Along their journey, she finds herself constantly looking for Arthur, as Cordelia attempts to “search every acre in the high-grown field,” for her lost father. She collects clippings of him from old magazines, stores them in a plastic bag. She tells other members of the ensemble about him, and this act of recounting feels a means of keeping him (and his world) alive.

From the beginning, the novel is engaged with Shakespeare’s works as embodied performances that spark various reactions and interpretations in an audience. Some characters treat Shakespeare’s words with utter reverence, and others who find him “insufferable.” Regardless, the companies who bring them to life are bound together by deep bonds of trust and a love for stories that transcend centuries. Unlike Lear, Mandel’s novel is threaded with hope—often in the act of performance itself. Even the most tragic art is a form of salvation.