WINNER OF THE 2020 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION - THE NO. 1 BESTSELLER 2021
'Richly sensuous... something special' The Sunday Times
'A thing of shimmering wonder' David Mitchell

TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.

On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.

Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.

Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

Women's prize for fiction 2020





Un jour d'été 1596, dans la campagne anglaise, une petite fille tombe gravement malade. Son frère jumeau, Hamnet, part chercher de l'aide car aucun de leurs parents n'est à la maison...


Agnes, leur mère, n'est pourtant pas loin, en train de cueillir des herbes médicinales dans les champs alentour ; leur père est à Londres pour son travail ; tous deux inconscients de cette maladie, de cette ombre qui plane sur leur famille et menace de tout engloutir.


Porté par une écriture d'une beauté inouïe, ce nouveau roman de Maggie O'Farrell est la bouleversante histoire d'un frère et d'une sœur unis par un lien indéfectible, celle d'un couple atypique marqué par un deuil impossible. C'est aussi l'histoire d'une maladie " pestilentielle " qui se diffuse sur tout le continent. Mais c'est avant tout une magnifique histoire d'amour et le tendre portrait d'un petit garçon oublié par l'Histoire, qui inspira pourtant à son père, William Shakespeare, sa pièce la plus célèbre.
Livre de l'année 2020 Librairies Waterstones

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 HAMNET. It was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller 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.

AprèsCette main qui a pris la mienne, récompensé du Costa Award, Maggie O'Farrell signe un roman éblouissant, chargé de délicatesse et de grâce. Des rues de Londres aux studios arty du New York des seventies, en passant par un village irlandais, le portrait inoubliable d'une famille suffoquant sous les mensonges et les non-dits.


Comme chaque matin depuis trente ans, Robert Riordan part acheter son journal. Mais en ce jour caniculaire de juillet 1976, Robert part et ne revient pas.
Dans leur maison londonienne, Gretta, sa femme, s'interroge : quelle mouche a bien pu le piquer ? Doit-elle prévenir les enfants ?
À peine réunis, ces derniers tentent de prendre la situation en main : les placards sont retournés, les tiroirs vidés, chaque pièce fouillée en quête d'indices.
Mais, alors que le mystère autour de leur père s'épaissit, les vieilles rancœurs ressurgissent. L'aîné en a assez : pourquoi est-ce toujours à lui de prendre en charge sa famille ? Quant aux deux sœurs, jadis si proches, quel événement a brisé leur lien, si terrible que la cadette a décidé de mettre un océan entre elles ? Et Gretta, a-t-elle vraiment tout dit ?

AFTER YOU'D GONE is the groundbreaking debut novel from the Costa-Award winning Maggie O'Farrell, author of THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and I AM, I AM, I AM. It is a stunning, best-selling novel of wrenching love and grief.

A distraught young woman boards a train at King's Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London.

AFTER YOU'D GONE follows Alice's mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story that is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at a family's heart.

Winner of the 2010 Costa Novel Award and a Sunday Times bestseller, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE by Maggie O'Farrell is a gorgeously written story of love and motherhood from the author of HAMNET and I AM, I AM, I AM.

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 fifty years, but connected in ways that neither could ever have expected.

A top-ten bestseller 2016, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE by Maggie O'Farrell crosses time zones and continents to reveal an extraordinary portrait of a marriage. 'A complex, riveting novel of love and hope that grips at the heart' The Sunday Times

A reclusive ex-film star living in the wilds of Ireland, Claudette Wells is a woman whose first instinct, when a stranger approaches her home, is to reach for her shotgun. Why is she so fiercely protective of her family, and what made her walk out of her cinematic career when she had the whole world at her feet?

Her husband Daniel, reeling from a discovery about a woman he last saw twenty years ago, is about to make an exit of his own. It is a journey that will send him off-course, far away from the life he and Claudette have made together. Will their love for one another be enough to bring Daniel back home?

Servi par une prose limpide et incisive,Quand tu es partiexplore la complexité des liens familiaux et affectifs, les terreurs qui vont de pair avec l'amour, mais aussi la déception, le deuil, et les effets pervers du mensonge. Premier roman de Maggie O'Farrell, paru en 2000, une œuvre lumineuse et sensible, à redécouvrir.
Nul ne sait ce qu'à vu Alice, ce matin-là, en arrivant à la gare d'Édimbourg, et qui l'a bouleversée au point de repartir immédiatement pour Londres. Au point, quelques heures plus tard, de vouloir mourir.
Tombée dans un profond coma, au gré des flottements de sa conscience, la jeune femme se souvient : de l'amour fou avec John, un journaliste, fils d'un juif intégriste qui l'a renié ; de l'étrange enfant, puis de l'adolescente fragile et rebelle qu'elle a été ; de l'affection d'Elspeth, sa grand-mère, et des heurts avec sa mère, Ann, beauté froide et énigmatique.
Et, tandis que la famille guette le moindre signe d'espoir, Ann est elle aussi rattrapée par le passé ; la genèse de ce drame affleure...

From the Costa Award winning, bestselling 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.

'Unputdownable' Ali Smith

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?

From the Costa Award winning Maggie O'Farrell comes the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller 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.

Set during the legendary summer of 1976, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE by Maggie O'Farrell was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller.

'The Riordans will stay in your mind long after you finish this book. They're funny, infuriating and impossible not to love. They feel like family' Irish Times

It's July 1976. In London, it hasn't rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he's going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn't come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta's children - two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce - back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.

AS FEATURED ON DESERT ISLAND DISCS, BIG SCOTTISH BOOK CLUB AND THE ZOE BALL BOOKCLUB, A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, IRISH TIMES, OBSERVER, RED and THE TELEGRAPH.
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE FOR MEMOIR AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY 2018*

I AM, I AM, I AM is a memoir with a difference - the unputdownable story of an extraordinary woman's life in near-death experiences. Insightful, inspirational, gorgeously written, it is a book to be read at a sitting, a story you finish newly conscious of life's fragility, determined to make every heartbeat count.

A childhood illness she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. A terrifying encounter on a remote path. A mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital. Shocking, electric, unforgettable, this is the extraordinary memoir from Costa Novel-Award winner and Sunday Timesbestselling author Maggie O'Farrell. It is a book to make you question yourself. What would you do if your life was in danger, and what would you stand to lose?