Events › Manchester Book Group

Pick up the next book club selection at the Manchester library service desk following the previous month's meeting on the 3rd Monday of the month. **NOTE Meetings in January and February each year are held on the FOURTH Monday of the month due to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and President's Day holidays

This month we are discussing: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

From the Publisher:
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.

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.