SC Book Club January 9, 2023, at 2-4pm – Fellows & External Fellows Only – Zoom Only

January 9, 2023, 2-4pm – Fellows and External Fellows

Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (also published as Hamnet and Judith) (2021)

Discussion Leader: Molly Wills

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle award and a New York Times bestseller, this is a fictionalized version of the love and family of Shakespeare (who is never named!) and Anne Hathaway. 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, as she is called here, 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, centripetal force in the life of her restless 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 that has been creeping across the land, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness. Hamnet is a portrait of a marriage, of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a recreation of the tragic story that inspired Hamlet.

(available in print, audiobook, e-book, 320 pp)