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
In
1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in
love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional
historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
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 his 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, and 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.
