Hamnet

A Novel Idea on Passyunk Verified independent store

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The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the product ion of his great play. "Miraculous... brilliant... A novel told with the urgency of a whispered prayer -- or curse... A richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death." -- Ron Charles, The Washington Post England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor--penniless and 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 and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and 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 and 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. MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh. Show more