Hamnet (Movie Tie-in Edition)

　　英國暢銷作家重新打造一段關於莎士比亞小兒子－哈姆雷特的故事
　　探究那段莎士比亞行蹤成謎的歲月⋯⋯

　　1580年，黑死病橫行整個英國大地，揮之不去的噩夢，持續干擾著所有的人，健康的、病殃的、老邁的、年輕的。末日似乎即將到來，然而人們還是必須繼續生活。

　　一位年輕的拉丁文助教，身無分文，經常飽受父親暴行，卻意外遇到了這位古怪又特別的女子－Agnes。地方的人們都知道Agnes擁有奇特的天賦，她非常了解藥草，擁有治病的能力，卻不擅長與人打交道，總是帶著她的獵鷹，慢慢地晃蕩在祖傳的田野間。兩個看似不相干的男女，最終奉子成婚，並舉家遷移來到了史特拉福這個小鎮。

　　1596年，某個夏日夜晚，這家的小女兒正躺在床上發著高燒，她的雙胞胎哥哥心急如焚，尋遍四處尋找求助，卻沒有半個人在家裡⋯當年的拉丁文助教，現在已搖身一變，成為倫敦劇本家新秀，正在監看最新劇作的排演；而母親Agnes則在遠處的花園裡，悉心照料她種的草藥。兩人都尚未意識到，他們將在一周內失去一位心愛的孩子⋯(文／博客來外文館)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Now a major motion picture starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn, directed by ACADEMY AWARD(R) winner Chloé Zhao.

The bestselling author of 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.

＂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 Post

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 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.

MAGGIE O’FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), The Marriage Portrait, After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.