Hamnet and Judith
Summary
Winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction New York Times Best Seller "[An] exceptional winner.... It expresses something profound about the human experience that seems both extraordinarily current and at the same time, enduring." (Martha Lane Fox, Chair of The Women's Prize for Fiction judges) Two extraordinary people. A love that draws them together. A plague that threatens to tear them apart. England, 1580. A young Latin tutor - penniless, bullied by a violent father - falls in love with an eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles on the Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband. His gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when their beloved twins, Hamnet and Judith, are afflicted with the bubonic plague, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet & Judith is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers. Published as Hamnet in the US and the UK.
©2020 Maggie O'Farrell (P)2020 Knopf Canada
Elysium Fire
Summary
Elysium Fire is a smoldering tale of murderers, secret cultists, tampered memories, and unthinkable power, of bottomless corruption and overpowering idealism from the king of modern space opera. Ten thousand city-state habitats orbit the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise. But even utopia needs a police force. For the citizens of the Glitter Band that organization is Panoply, and the prefects are its operatives. Prefect Tom Dreyfus has a new emergency on his hands. Across the habitats and their hundred million citizens, people are dying suddenly and randomly, victims of a bizarre and unprecedented malfunction of their neural implants. And these "melters" leave no clues behind as to the cause of their deaths.... As panic rises in the populace, a charismatic figure is sowing insurrection, convincing a small but growing number of habitats to break away from the Glitter Band and form their own independent colonies. For more from Alastair Reynolds, check out: Revenger
©2018 Alastair Reynolds (P)2018 Hachette Audio
I Am, I Am, I Am
Summary
An extraordinary memoir - told entirely in near-death experiences - from one of Britain's best-selling novelists, for fans of Wild, When Breath Becomes Air, and The Year of Magical Thinking. We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death. I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter - for whom this book was written - from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers. Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O'Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.
©2018 Maggie O'Farrell (P)2018 Random House Audio
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Summary
From the Costa Award winning, best-selling author of This Must Be the Place and I Am, I Am, I Am, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen and reclaimed.  Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris's questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?
©2006 Maggie O'Farrell (P)2006 Maggie O'Farrell
The Hand That First Held Mine
Summary
An unforgettable novel of love and motherhood from best-selling author Maggie O'Farrell. Winner of the 2010 Costa Novel Award and a Sunday Times best seller, The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell is a gorgeously written story of love and motherhood from the author of This Must Be the Place. When the sophisticated Innes Kent turns up on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realises she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life. In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child. Elina struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with her sense of herself as an artist and Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood that don't tally with his parents' version of events. As Ted begins to search for answers, an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed, separated by 50 years, but connected in ways that neither could ever have expected.
©2010 Maggie O'Farrell (P)2012 Headline Digital
The Distance Between Us
Summary
Gripping, insightful and deft, The Distance Between Us by Maggie O'Farrell is a haunting story of the way our families shape our lives, from the award-winning author of This Must Be The Place . It was a Sunday Times top 10 best seller and won the Somerset Maugham Award. On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous. They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.
©2004 Maggie O'Farrell (P)2004 Headline Publishing Group Ltd
Maggie O'Farrell
Summary
Audible Exclusive. Maggie O'Farrell joins us to talk about This Must Be the Place.
©2016 Audible Ltd (P)2016 Audible Ltd
My Lover's Lover
Summary
A compulsive and haunting tale of the passion, betrayal, sensuality and ambiguity at the heart of shifting metropolitan lives. From the Costa Award winning Maggie O'Farrell comes the Sunday Times top 10 best seller My Lover's Lover, an intense, unnerving and passionate story of betrayal, loss and love, with all the frisson and psychological intensity of Rebecca. When Lily moves into Marcus's flat and plunges headlong into a relationship, she must contend not merely with the disapproval of flatmate Aidan, but with a more intangible, hostile presence. Could it be that Sinead, Marcus's ex, is trying to communicate with her? When Lily begins to 'see' Sinead, first about the flat and then on the streets of London, she must question not merely her sanity, but whether the man she loves is someone she can, or indeed ought, to live with at all.
©2002 Maggie O'Farrell (P)2012 Headline Digital
I am I am I am
Summary
Après le succès d'Assez de bleu dans le ciel, Maggie O'Farrell revient avec un nouveau tour de force littéraire. Poétique, subtile, intense, une Åuvre à part qui nous parle tout à la fois de féminisme, de maternité, de violence, de peur et d'amour, portée par une construction vertigineuse. Une romancière à l'apogée de son talent. Il y a ce cou, qui a manqué être étranglé par un violeur en Ãcosse. Il y a ces poumons, qui ont cessé leur Åuvre quelques instants dans l'eau glacée. Il y a ce ventre, meurtri par les traumatismes de l'accouchement... Dix-sept instants. Dix-sept petites morts. Dix-sept résurrections. Je suis, je suis, je suis. I am, I am, I am.
©2019 Belfond (P)2019 Audible Studios