I had heard several people say “Hamnet was such a great book!” so of course right away I avoided it. I never seem to like what everyone likes. However, I got it on audio and I LOVED this story. I loved the writing. I loved the characters. I don’t even know why I loved it so much, but it’s truly so beautifully written and exquisitely narrated that it’s destined to be one of my top reads this year.

Here’s the overview:

A New York Times best seller

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life…here is a novel…so gorgeously written that it transports you.” (The Boston Globe)

In 1580s 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 reimagining 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 pause – a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

I got mine with an Audible credit – and I’m so glad I did!

Don’t miss this one!