{ "item_title" : "Hamnet", "item_author" : [" Maggie O'Farrell "], "item_description" : "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - Now a major motion picture starring ACADEMY AWARD(R) winner Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn, directed by Chlo Zhao.The acclaimed author of the Reese's Book Club pick The Marriage Portrait delivers 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 Hamlet.Miraculous. . . . Brilliant. . . . A novel told with the urgency of a whispered prayer--or curse. . . . A richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death. --Ron Charles, The Washington PostEngland, 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. Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/52/565/760/0525657606_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "32.00", "online_price" : "32.00", "our_price" : "32.00", "club_price" : "32.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet is both a brilliant re-creation of the lives of William Shakespeare and his family in late 16th-century Stratford-upon-Avon and an emotionally intense account of the death of the dramatist’s young son and its painful aftermath.

Told mostly through the eyes of Shakespeare’s wife, herbalist and clairvoyant Agnes (known to history as Anne Hathaway), Hamnet shifts between the early 1580s, when she and William meet as he’s tutoring her stepsiblings on their farm outside Stratford, and 1596, when the couple resides in a small apartment next to her in-laws’ house. William struggles to escape his overbearing father and the family’s glove-making business to pursue his writing career.

In a flawlessly executed chapter that’s especially chilling in this time of global pandemic, O’Farrell traces the path of the bubonic plague from a glass-blowing factory near Venice to the Shakespeare home, where it afflicts Judith, the twin sister of 11-year-old Hamnet. Through a supernatural chain of events initiated by Hamnet, the disease passes from the girl to her sibling, and Agnes’ joy at Judith’s miraculous recovery is eclipsed by the horror of the boy’s unexpected death. What follows is a vivid and heartbreaking portrait of grief, as Agnes tries to adjust to life without Hamnet, while William travels to London and moves forward as a celebrated playwright. 

An award-winning writer who has published seven previous novels, O’Farrell excels at evoking the essence of the Shakespeares’ daily lives in Stratford, from the claustrophobia of the family’s dwelling to the beauty of Agnes’ beloved forest, where she gathers plants to fashion her potions. But in addition to getting all the details right, O’Farrell succeeds in creating psychologically acute portraits of characters living at a distance of more than 400 years. Graceful and moving, Hamnet is a triumph of literary and historical fiction.