Hamnet

A thrilling departure: A short, piercing, deeply moving new novel from the acclaimed author of I Am, I Am, I Am , about the death of Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son Hamnet—a name interchangeable with Hamlet in fifteenth-century Britain—and the years leading up to the production of his great play. England, 1580. A young Latin tutor—penniless, bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, 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 with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when his beloved young son succumbs to bubonic plague. A luminous...