WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"[An] exceptional winner. . . . It expresses something profound about the human experience that seems both extraordinarily current and at the same time, enduring." -Martha Lane Fox, Chair of The Women's Prize for Fiction judges
Two extraordinary people. A love that draws them together. A plague that threatens to tear them apart.
England, 1580. A young Latin tutor-penniless, bullied by a violent father-falls in love with an eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles on the Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband. His gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when their beloved twins, Hamnet and Judith, are afflicted with the bubonic plague, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness.
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers. WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION AND THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"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
"Maggie O'Farrell is known for penning the most literary of fiction. And she does not disappoint with this stunning-though sorrowful-outing." -Toronto Star
"All too timely . . . inspired. . . . [An] exceptional historical novel." -The New Yorker
"A tour de force. . . . Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages-from the pain of childbirth to the unassuageable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell." -NPR
"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." -The Washington Post
"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
"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
"A moving portrait of a mother's grief. . . . O'Farrell's prose is characteristically beautiful." -The Wall Street Journal
"Wholly original, fully engrossing. . . . Agnes is a character for the ages-enigmatic, fully formed and nearly literally bewitc
