This book took me an absurdly long time to read, but man, was it worth it. Hilary Mantel's brain is some sort of freakish treasure - every time I read her, I am simultaneously elated by the beautiful things she creates and depressed that I will never be able to write the way she does. She breaks ...
I don't read thrillers, and this novel by the "Wolf Hall" and "Bring up the Bodies" master is not a thriller, but the way it dilated and slowed right when you knew something terrible was going to happen was so terrifying that I actually couldn't continue (for a few hours anyway). This not-thrille...
Here’s the perfect set-up for a black comedy: an overweight, repressed psychic named Alison must confront her own ghosts—and not just symbolic ghosts, like mere stand-ins of desires and secrets, but actual, real ghosts—the Fiends she calls them. What makes Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel really ...
After gorging on Every Day Is Mother's Day, the prequel to this book (and being a bit disappointed, really, by the "horror" elements of the former,) I took my time with this novel, savoring Ms Mantel's clean, sharp prose and enjoying the contrast in the same characters written of previously, enge...
It took me some time to read this horrifying novel by Hilary Mantel, not because it isn't well-written or compelling, but because often it's simply so painful to read. There is a mystery, a shadowy bit of skulduggery that gathers force toward the end, but the impact of the book is not in this art...
This review could be 20 paragraphs long, that's how personal a connection this novel had for me in reaction. More than just enjoyable, at least 1/2 was outright LOL, literally. The descriptive mastery! Not an easy read, as there are 4 comparative context metaphors or some kind of nuance allusion ...
And along came Muriel...‘Every day is Mother’s Day’ is the story of Evelyn and Muriel Axon, a mother and daughter who live a reclusive life in the house that Muriel was born. Evelyn has raised Muriel alone since the death of her husband, Clifford when Muriel was 6 years old, Clifford unfortunatel...
This book was published in 1989 long before Mantel became a household name (in households that pay attention to the winners of the Booker Prize), indeed when I first read it she was relatively unknown. It was the second book of hers that I read, the first being Beyond Black another magic realism ...
Hughes lapses into beautiful writing on occasion, but I had too many unanswered questions. Well, maybe not that many, but: why this story arc? It seemed so strange; we barely get established and acquaint ourselves with the above-stairs and below-stairs characters in Wales and England before the...
The Wooden Shepherdess is the sequel to The Fox in the Attic, and the second volume of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." It opens with Hughes's hero Augustine in prohibition era America, where he is a bemused onlooker and an increasingly fascinated participa...
How interesting -- looking up this book, which is not quite the edition I read it in, or not the same picture anyway, I realised how many different books there are with this title. Anyway, this is the only Giving Up the Ghost I have read.And it's good.It's also the only Hilary Mantel I've read, t...
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.
HILARY MANTEL is one of Britain's most accomplished and acclaimed writers. In these ten bracingly transgressive tales, all her gifts of characterisation and observation are fully engaged, ushering concealed horrors into the light. Childhood cruelty is played out behind the bushes in 'Comma'; nurs...
The evidence is complex and sometimes contradictory; the sources are often dubious, tainted and after-the-fact. There is no official transcript of her trial, and we can reconstruct her last days only in fragments, with the help of contemporaries who may be inaccurate, biased, forgetful, elsewhere...
He wanted more tea, and biscuits too. “I won’t dispute it,” he said. “I won’t dispute it any more. Your congregation have superstitions that would disgrace Sicilian peasants.” “But I am afraid,” Father Angwin said, “that if you take away the statues, and next the Latin, next the feast days, the f...
This is the time when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and jailers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead. At this time of year, with their parish, he and Liz would keep vigil. They would pray for Henry Wykys, her father; for Liz’s dead husband, Thomas Williams; for Walt...
But if I hurry I will lose the thread; or the narrative will be like knitting done in a bad temper. The tension goes wrong; you come back later, measure your work, and find that it hasn’t grown as you imagined. Then you must unravel it, row by row, resenting each slick twist and pull that undoes,...
They had met before, of course. The county of Norfolk is not so populous that they could have avoided each other. Their conduct at these meetings had been shaped by Ginny’s lofty and willful ignorance of the situation: by Emma’s sangfroid: by Felix’s natural desire to maintain an arrangement that...
Her headdress?’ He says, ‘The people at the Tower have them. It is their perquisite.’ ‘Buy them back,’ the king says. ‘I want to know they are destroyed.’ The king says, ‘Call in all the keys that admit to my privy chamber. Here and elsewhere. All the keys to all the rooms. I want the locks chang...
Colette snatched the sachet and ripped it open. “And for some reason, the neighbours seem to think I’m responsible.” Colette smirked. Al mopped her forehead. “That doctor, I could see straight through him. His liver’s beyond ...
When the day came, I wondered why I’d agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or something else diverting. Besides, I had a sentimental yearning for the days of self-improvement; t...