Hamnet
<b>NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • “Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life ... here is a novel ... so gorgeously written that it transports you." —<i>The Boston Globe</i><br /><br /></b>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” (<i>The New Yorker</i>) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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, <i>Hamnet</i> is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.