Vacant Possession

Vacant Possession

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

Lock your doors, barricade your windows: Muriel Axon is back in town. It's been ten years since she was locked away for killing her mad old mother. Now she wants to lay Mother's ghost to rest and find her missing child. But above all, she wants revenge. Her former social worker and her old neighbours have made new lives, but Muriel, with her talent for disguise, will infiltrate their homes and exploit their talents for self-destruction, until at last all her enemies are brought together for a gruesome finale. Hilary Mantel's razor-sharp wit animates every page. This malevolent black comedy has as many twists and turns as a well-plotted thriller.
Read online
  • 1 203
The Giant, O'Brien

The Giant, O'Brien

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. In the midst of it all is the Giant, O'Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in myths, fairies, miracles, and little people. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. O'Brien's opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter, who lusts after the Giant's corpse as a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge. In her acclaimed novel, two-time Man Booker Prize winning author Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of Ireland and England. As belief wrestles knowledge and science wrestles song, so The Giant, O'Brien calls to us from a fork in the road as a tale of time, and a timeless tale.
Read online
  • 1 183
An Experiment in Love

An Experiment in Love

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

Hilary Mantel's seventh novel examines the pressures on women during the 1960s to excel--but not be too successful--in England's complex hierarchy of class and status. Pushed by a domineering mother, Carmel McBain climbs her way through the pecking order and ends up at London University as an acquiescent and undernourished teenager, achieving the status so desired by her mother, but too weak to make use of it or pose a threat to anyone. Though this is Carmel's story, it reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper.
Read online
  • 1 121
Beyond Black

Beyond Black

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. This is Hilary Mantel at her finest--insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read.
Read online
  • 1 110
Every Day Is Mother's Day

Every Day Is Mother's Day

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

Evelyn Axon is a medium by trade; her daughter, Muriel, is a half-wit by nature. Barricaded in their crumbling house, surrounded by the festering rubbish of years, they defy the curiosity of their neighbors and their social worker, Isabel Field. Isabel is young and inexperienced and has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders the streets, and a lover, Colin, who wants her to run away with him. But Colin has three horrible children and a shrill wife who is pregnant again; how is he going to run anywhere? As Isabel wrestles with her own problems, a horrible secret grows in the darkness of the Axon household. When at last it comes to light, the result is by turns hilarious and terrifying.
Read online
  • 1 017
Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
Read online
  • 832

Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary

Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

Just after 'Bring Up the Bodies' author Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker for 'Wolf Hall', she fell gravely ill. This is her remarkable hospital diary. Originally published in the London Review of Books, this diary by the acclaimed author Hilary Mantel explores in forensic detail her loss of dignity, her determination, the concentration of the senses into an animalistic struggle to get through, and the attendant hallucinations she was plagued by during her stay in hospital. With her health now improved, and the acknowledgement of the Man Booker prize-winning follow-up to 'Wolf Hall', 'Bring Up the Bodies' as one of our greatest works of fiction, 'Ink in the Blood' remains a significant testament to the traumas of illness, and one of the most incredible and haunting essays published in a very long time.
Read online
  • 707
Giving Up the Ghost

Giving Up the Ghost

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most improbable of accomplishments, including "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay," were within her grasp. Once married, however, she acquired a persistent pain that led to destructive drugs and patronizing psychiatry, ending in an ineffective but irrevocable surgery. There would be no children; in herself she found instead one novel, and then another.
Read online
  • 683
A Memoir of My Former Self

A Memoir of My Former Self

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

THE FINAL BOOK FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST WRITERSIn addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. "Ink is a generative fluid," she explains. "If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all." A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels—revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young...
Read online
  • 596
Fludd

Fludd

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin-or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. No matter how copiously Father Angwin drinks while he confesses his broken faith, the level of the bottle does not drop. Although Fludd does not appear to be eating, the food on his plate disappears. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action. Knitting together the miraculous and the mundane, the dreadful and the ludicrous, Fludd is a tale of alchemy and transformation told with astonishing art, insight, humor, and wit.
Read online
  • 522
The School of English

The School of English

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

A new story from Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and twice winner of the Man Booker Prize. This story is also available in the paperback and eBook edition of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. ‘Lastly,’ Mr Maddox said, ‘and to conclude our tour, we come to a very special part of the house.’ He paused, to impress on her that she was going to have a treat. ‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’ ‘The School of English’ invites us behind the stucco façade of a Notting Hill mansion where fear and cruelty grip a household.
Read online
  • 492
Mantel Pieces

Mantel Pieces

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

From the twice Booker Prize winner and internationally bestselling Hilary Mantel, a collection of writing – essays, book reviews, memoir – from over thirty years contributing to the London Review of Books In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, 'I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.' This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next. Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britain's last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar...
Read online
  • 282
A Change of Climate

A Change of Climate

Hilary Mantel

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction

Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. Thirty years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and thirty years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.
Read online
  • 281
183