Hamnet, Paperback/Maggie O'Farrell

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD *A New York Times Best Seller* "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. About author(s): Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, Maggie O'Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland. She is the author of eight novels: After You'd Gone (winner of the Betty Trask Award); My Lover's Lover ; The Distance Between Us (recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award); The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox ; The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Book Award); Instructions for a Heatwave ; This Must Be the Place ; and Hamnet , which won the Women's Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written a memoir, I Am , I Am , I Am Seventeen Brushes with Death , and a picture book for children, Where Snow Angels Go. She lives in Edinburgh.