A companion piece to the captivating memoir 'Giving Up The Ghost' by the Man Booker-winning author, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.
This sharp, funny collection of stories drawn from life begins in the 1950s in an insular northern village 'scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.' For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out.
In 'King Billy is a Gentleman', the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. 'Curved Is the Line of Beauty' is a story of friendship, faith and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In 'Third Floor Rising', she watches, dazzled, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.
With a deceptively light touch, Mantel locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.
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Hilary Mantel is the first British writer to win two Man Booker Prizes. This set brings together six of her greatest novels – the first two books in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, the record-setting Man Booker prize-winners ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies’.’ A Place of Greater Safety’ is an epic of Revolutionary France. The darkly comic ‘Beyond Black’ is a lively tale of a psychic and the impish spirits she summons. ‘The Giant, O’Brien’ tells the story of the legendary Charles Byrne and the surgeon who wanted his bones. And a family seeks refuge after an unfortunate African sojourn in ‘A Change of Climate’.
For fans of the best literature eager to discover one of our greatest writers, this collection is essential reading.
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A brilliant – and rather transgressive – collection of short stories from the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies'.
Including a new story 'The School of English'.
Nothing is as it seems. Childhood cruelty is played out behind bushes. Both the living and the dead commute to Waterloo station. Staying in for the plumber turns into a potentially fatal waiting game. And in ‘The School of English’, panic grips a household behind the stucco facade of a Notting Hill mansion. All that is clear and constant in these bracingly subversive stories is Hilary Mantel’s distinctive style and wit.
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From the double Man Booker prize-winner comes an extraordinary work of historical imagination – this is Hilary Mantel’s epic novel of the French Revolution.
A spellbinding, epic novel which recounts the events between the fall of the Ancient Regime and the peak of the Terror, as seen through the eyes of the French Revolution’s three protagonists – Georges-Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, men whose mix of ambition, idealism, and ego helped unleash the darker side of the Revolution’s ideals and brought them eventually to their own tragic ends.
Critically acclaimed upon first publication, ‘A Place of Greater Safety’ is one of Mantel’s most celebrated works of fiction.
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An hilarious and sinister tale of dark secrets and secret forces in suburban England from the critically-acclaimed author of 'Giving Up the Ghost'.
Alison Hart is a medium by trade: dead people talk to her, and she talks back. With her flat-eyed, flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, she tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital road, passing on messages from dead ancestors: 'Granny says she likes your new kitchen units.'
Alison's ability to communicate with spirits is a torment rather than a gift. Behind her plump, smiling and bland public persona is a desperate woman. She knows that the next life holds terrors that she must conceal from her clients. Her days and nights are haunted by the men she knew in her childhood, the thugs and petty criminals who preyed upon her hopeless, addled mother, Emmie. They infiltrate her house, her body and her soul; the more she tries to be rid of them, the stronger and nastier they become.
This tenth novel by Hilary Mantel is a witty and deeply sinister story of dark secrets and forces, set in an England that jumps at its own shadow, a country whose banal self-absorption is shot through by fear of the engulfing dark.
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