Hamnet : A novel

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION   WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION   A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "[An] exceptional winner. . . . It expresses something profound about the human experience that seems both extraordinarily current and at the same time, enduring." --Martha Lane Fox, Chair of The Women's Prize for Fiction judges Two extraordinary people. A love that draws them together. A plague that threatens to tear them apart. England, 1580. A young Latin tutor--penniless, bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles on the Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband. His gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when their beloved twins, Hamnet and Judith, are afflicted with the bubonic plague, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet & Judith is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers.