Shelfology Book Pairing

by Bill Bryson

Twenty years after his trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island that had become his adopted country, Bill Bryson makes a brand new journey around Britain to see what has changed. From Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, by way of places that many people never get to at all, Bryson sets out to rediscover the beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly unique country that he thought he knew but doesn't altogether recognize anymore. Yet, despite Britain's occasional failings and more or less eternal bewilderments, he is still pleased to call this rainy island home - and not just because of the cream teas, a noble history, and an extra day off at Christmas ...

by Maggie O'Farrell

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn, directed by ACADEMY AWARD® winner Chloé Zhao. The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the production of his great play. "Miraculous. . . . Brilliant. . . . A novel told with the urgency of a whispered prayer—or curse. . . . A richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post 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. Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.