Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell | GGP Online Book Club | Tue. Oct. 6 @ 7 PM PDT

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October 6, 2020 - 7:00pm

Photo of author and book cover and time/date of event

Please join us on Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of Maggie O'Farrell's new novel, HAMNET.

The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85002634130.

You can order a copy in hardcover at https://bit.ly/GGPHamnet, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP's audiobook partner, at https://bit.ly/HamnetAB.

August 2020 Indie Next List


“I loved Hamnet in very much the same way I loved Lincoln in the Bardo. This novel explores the way the dead haunt the living—especially how the death of a child haunts their parents—and does it in the context of a fascinating historical figure and time. But we know so much about the Lincolns, and so little about the Shakespeares. Maggie O’Farrell’s ability to construct a palpably real emotional life for all the members of the Shakespeare family—but especially for Shakespeare’s wife—is just magical. This is a powerful and haunting novel.”— Nina Barrett, Bookends & Beginnings, Evanston, IL

Description


England, 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 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.

About the Author


Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, Maggie O’Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland and now lives in Edinburgh. She is the author of The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award); Instructions for a Heatwave; This Must Be the Place; and most recently, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.

Praise For…


NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"Hamnet is an exploration of marriage and grief written into the silent opacities of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure... In Hamnet, Shakespeare's marriage is complicated and troubled, yet brimming with love and passion... This novel is at once about the transfiguration of life into art-- it is O'Farrell's extended speculation on how Hamnet's death might have fueled the creation of one of his father's greatest plays-- and at the same time, it is a master class in how she, herself does it... O'Farrell has a melodic relationship to language.  There is a poetic cadence to her writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world... We can smell the tang of the various new leathers in the glover's workshop, the fragrance of the apples racked a finger-width apart in the winter storage shed, and we can see how the pale London sun "reaches down, like ladders, through the narrow gaps in buildings to illuminate the rain glazed street."... As the book unfolds, it brings its story to a tender and ultimately hopeful conclusion: that even the greatest grief, the most damaged marriage, and most shattered heart might find some solace, some healing."
--Geraldine Brooks, the New York Times Book Review [COVER]

“All too timely...inspired...[An] exceptional historical novel ”
The New Yorker

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Hamnet By Maggie O'Farrell Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9780525657606
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Knopf - July 21st, 2020

Location: 

Online with Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85002634130
Oakland, CA 94611
United States