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Hamnet (Movie Tie-in Edition)

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From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell, a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the production of his great play. Soon to be a major motion picture from Chloé Zhao, Oscar award-winning director of Nomadland, and starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley.

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting healthy and sick, old and 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 taking off when their beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.
© Murdo Macleod
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 GoneThe Vanishing Act of Esme LennoxThe 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. View titles by Maggie O'Farrell
  • WINNER | 2020
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • WINNER | 2020
    Women's Prize for Fiction
  • SELECTION | 2021
    ALA Notable Book
  • SHORTLIST | 2021
    Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

About

From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell, a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the production of his great play. Soon to be a major motion picture from Chloé Zhao, Oscar award-winning director of Nomadland, and starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley.

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting healthy and sick, old and 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 taking off when their beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

Author

© Murdo Macleod
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 GoneThe Vanishing Act of Esme LennoxThe 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. View titles by Maggie O'Farrell

Awards

  • WINNER | 2020
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • WINNER | 2020
    Women's Prize for Fiction
  • SELECTION | 2021
    ALA Notable Book
  • SHORTLIST | 2021
    Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

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