Maggie O'Farrell, Author of Hamnet, in Conversation with Ann Patchett

Maggie O'Farrell celebrates the paperback release of Hamnet, in conversation with Ann Patchett.

About the Book

A New York Times Best Seller
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
In 1580's England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this "exceptional historical novel" ( The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction.
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

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, and eight novels: After You'd Gone, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand that First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award, This Must Be the Place, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Novel Award, and Hamnet.
She lives in Edinburgh.

About Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is the author of eight novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, State of Wonder, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House. She was the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006, and has written three books of nonfiction: Truth & Beauty, What now?, and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.
Ann Patchett lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Karl VanDevender, and their dog, Sparky.