Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

An Afternoon with Maggie O’Farrell

In conversation with Colette Bancroft

Hamnet

(Vintage, $16.95)

Sunday, June 13, 1 PM ET

LIVE via Crowdcast

REGISTER HERE FOR FREE

“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

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.

BUY THE BOOK HERE 

About the Author:

Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, Maggie O’Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland. She is the author of eight novels: After You’d Gone (winner of the Betty Trask Award); My Lover’s Lover; The Distance Between Us (recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award); The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox; The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Book Award); Instructions for a Heatwave; This Must Be the Place; and Hamnet, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, and a picture book for children, Where Snow Angels Go. She lives in Edinburgh.

About the Moderator:

Colette Bancroft has been the book editor at the Tampa Bay Times since 2007. In addition to writing reviews and interviewing authors, she directs the annual Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading. She served two terms on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Bancroft earned degrees in English from the University of South Florida and the University of Florida, and she wishes she had finished her dissertation on the novels of Raymond Chandler.