Learning to Talk

Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.

'Mercilessly funny' Daily Telegraph 'Mantel writes with wit, compassion and great elegance.' Independent on Sunday On 'Giving Up the Ghost': 'Like Lorna Sage's BAD BLOOD, GIVING UP THE GHOST is a story of childhood that is also a piece of history. Hilary Mantel's self-portrait is a masterpiece of wit, but it conjures up a time and a place and an epoch of female experience with razor-edged sobriety. That past, so thoroughly vanished, is made to live again here -- disclosed, cannily and heartbreakingly, as once it too yielded up its author's mind.' Rachel Cusk 'What a remarkable writer she is. She is piercingly, even laceratingly observant, and every remembered detail has the sharpness of a good photograph. And yet for all its brilliance of detail and its black comedy the memoir is heavy with atmophere. It's a very startling and daring memoir; the more I read it the more unsettling it becomes.' Helen Dunmore 'I was riveted. It's raw, it's distressing and it's full of piercing insights into a novelist's mind.' Margaret Forster ON HILARY MANTEL: 'She writes like an angel ! and it is this angelic prose which turns the reader dizzy with pleasure.' David Robson, Sunday Telegraph 'Mantel can out-write most writers of her generation, male and female.' Maggie Gee, Sunday Times 'Hilary Mantel is a wonderfully unsurprised dissector of human motivation.' Helen Dunmore, Observer 'Mantel writes prose of imperturbable aplomb, crisp with irony and highlighted with deftly placed, elegantly surprising images ! she has a penchant for caustic, spiky heroines and a sardonic ear for dialogue.' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 'Hilary Mantel is a novelist of remarkable diversity. She writes about curiosity, companionship, art, love, death and eternity. She writes with wit, compassion and great elegance.' Sue Gaisford, Independent on Sunday