The Astonishing Color of After
8.3
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Life, loss, love and art explode in a kaleidoscope of emotions as one girl must learn the truth...
young adult
The Sober Diaries: How one woman stopped drinking and started living
10.0
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A bravely honest and brilliantly comic account of how one mother gave up drinking and started living...
Around the Way Girl: A Memoir
Taraji P. Henson and Denene Millner
8.0
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From Taraji P. Henson, Academy Award nominee, Golden Globe winner, and star of the award-winning...
Twelve Kings
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In the cramped west end of Sharakhai, the Amber Jewel of the Desert, Ceda fights in the pits to...
Here Comes the Bribe: A Bed-and-Breakfast Mystery
6.0
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Judith McMonigle Flynn has her hands full with unexpected family ties and a dead body in the...
Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me: My Journey Through Depression
Book
Black Rainbow is the powerful first-person story of one woman's struggle with depression and how she...
Marriage During Deployment: A Memoir of a Military Marriage
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Since combat operations began in October 2001, more than 2.1 million U.S service members have been...
The Empowered Mama: How to Reclaim Your Time and Yourself While Raising a Happy, Healthy Family
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Get powerful tools to nurture and replenish your body and mind in The Empowered Mom Moms who work...
Hamnet is an imagining of what could have happened to Shakespeare’s son - even in the parish records it doesn’t say what his cause of death was. Maggie O’Farrell makes this version completely plausible though: plague should have been a real threat at this time. It killed indiscriminately: young and old, rich and poor, weak and strong. They were all vulnerable to illnesses with no cures. I’m something of an emotional reader at the best of times, but as Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, was preparing her son for burial, I was crying in to my breakfast. My 16 year old son looked at me over the top of his bacon butty and said:”Another sad bookthen, Mum?”, and shook his head. To read of a mother and her dead son, and see my 13 and 16 year old sons merrily tucking in to their bacon sandwiches, may not have been the ideal time to be reading this.
This is the kind of book that makes you really look at how precarious life was in those times, and how lucky we are today to have so few worries on this scale (Covid-19 aside!).
The writing is so beautiful, so descriptive and emotive: it picks you up and sets you down squarely in Elizabethan Stratford, making you feel exactly how Agnes must have felt. Honestly, it broke my heart to read of her pain.
If you haven’t read this yet, you’re in for a treat. This deserves ALL the awards.