Shelfology Book Pairing

by Jenny Offill

They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation. They used to be young, brave, and giddy with hopes for their future. They got married, had a child, and skated through all the small calamities of family life. But then, slowly, quietly something changes. As the years rush by, fears creep in and doubts accumulate until finally their life as they know it cracks apart and they find themselves forced to reassess what they have lost, what is left, and what they want now. Written with the dazzling lucidity of poetry, Dept. of Speculation navigates the jagged edges of a modern marriage to tell a story that is darkly funny, surprising and wise.

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.