The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter — Grace Tiffany

For readers of Hilary Mantel and Madeline Miller, a deeply engrossing work of historical fiction -- a tale of a woman of the Shakespeare family struggling to manage both her private grief and public danger.  

At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and twin of the long-dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and child who have been displaced by civil war -- the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adult sons to the plague.

The sequel to the author's My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth, The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter revisits this character for the ages -- Shakespeare's sharp-tongued, witty youngest child, no less feisty in her maturity. Four-hundred years after Judith's death, Grace Tiffany brings her back onto center stage. Judith's latest tale offers profound insights -- into friendship, motherhood, marriage, religious extremism, and war -- which remain resoundingly true today.