NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief, and a boy whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time. • "Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare's life ... here is a novel ... so gorgeously written that it transports you." -The Boston Globe
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. NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • One of Bill Gates's Favorite Books of the Year • Book Club Pick: Duchess Camilla Parker Bowles' The Reading Room
"O'Farrell has a melodic relationship to language. There is a poetic cadence to her writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world. . . . We can smell the tang of the various new leathers in the glover's workshop, the fragrance of the apples racked a finger-width apart in the winter storage shed. . . . As the book unfolds, it brings its story to a tender and ultimately hopeful conclusion: that even the greatest grief, the most damaged marriage, and most shattered heart might find some solace, some healing."
-Geraldine Brooks, the New York Times Book Review
"All too timely . . . inspired. . . . [An] exceptional historical novel "
-The New Yorker
"Magnificent and searing. . . . A family saga so bursting with life, touched by magic, and anchored in affection. . . . Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare's life, about whether he even wrote his own plays, here is a novel that matches him with a woman overwhelmingly more than worthy."
-The Boston Globe
"A tour de force. . . . Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages-from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell."
-NPR
"O'Farrell moves through the family's pain like a master of signs and signals. . . . In Hamnet, art imitates life not to co-opt reality, but to help us bear it."
-Los Angeles Times
"Wholly original, fully engrossing. . . . Agnes is a character for the ages-engimatic, fully formed and nearly literally bewitching to behold in every scene she's in."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"A moving portrait of a mother's grief. . . . O'Farrell's prose is characteristically beautiful."
-The Wall Street Journal
"Miraculous... brilliant... A novel told with the urgency of a whispered prayer - or curse... through the alchemy of her own vision, she has created a moving story about the way loss viciously recalibrates a marriage... A richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death."
--Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"What could be more common, over centuries and continents, than the death of a child - and yet Maggie O'Farrell, with her flawless sentences and furious heart, somehow makes it new. This story of remarkable people bereft of their boy will
