Boyhood
David Keenan
Independent Scottish Booksellers
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In stock
Scottish BookAuthor: Maggie O'Farrell
£10.95
Hamnet is Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel about Shakespeare’s family, centred on Agnes and the death of their son Hamnet in 1596. It explores grief, marriage and the fragile life of a household shaped by absence and loss. For readers of literary historical fiction focused on family, memory and emotional depth.
dispatched by Royal Mail Tracked 48
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On a summer’s day in 1596 in Stratford upon Avon, a young girl takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches for help, moving through a house where the adults are absent, and asking a question that has no comfort in it. Why is nobody at home.
Their mother, Agnes, is more than a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither of them knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.
Hamnet tells the story of Agnes and Will, and of the love that draws them together, set against a loss that threatens to tear their lives apart. It turns towards a son whose life has been all but forgotten, and holds him in the centre of the family’s grief, as the absence he leaves behind begins to shape what comes after.