Giant, O’Brien

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.

‘[A] novel that magically creates an illusion of the Age of Enlightenment. Hilary Mantel puts the stink of the eighteenth century into our nostrils’ Independent‘A novelist of remarkable diversity…She writes about curiosity, companionship, art, love, death and eternity. She writes with wit, compassion and great elegance. Her books never fail to surprise, nor to delight: in this one she is at her very best – so far’ Independent on Sunday‘Mantel can out-write most writers of her generation, male and female. What she has done here is disturbing, grievous and extraordinary.’ Maggie Gee, Sunday Times'Filled with bizarre happenings, brazen images and characters whose earthiness you can smell.' TES'Hilary Mantel has felt herself into the poetics of history with singular intensity.' New York Review'Pathos and humour as they are elsewhere in the book are blended to perfection.' Sunday Telegraph'Simultaneously vigorous and poetic, full of satisfying earthy details.' Sunday Independent (Ireland)