•• Winner of ••
Women’s Prize For Fiction 2020
National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction 2020
British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year 2021
One of our greatest living novelists resurrects the short life of Hamnet Shakespeare, in a lyrically written & emotionally devastating account of the Bard’s only son.
Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, & has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet. Drawing on her long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic play, Maggie O’Farrell writes Hamnet as a luminous portrait of a marriage & at its heart the loss of a beloved child.
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England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old & the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.
A young Latin tutor—penniless & bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove & is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants & potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother & a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
