As well as her celebrated career as a novelist,Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals,unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself.'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.
Mantel's subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping 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 she endured as a young woman,and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here,too,is a selection of her film reviews - from When Harry Met Sally to RoboCop - and,published for the first time,her stunning Reith Lectures,which explore the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life.
From her unique childhood to her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall Trilogy,A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel's life in her own dazzling words,'messages from people I used to be.'Compelling,often very funny,always luminous,it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.
Publisher: John Murray PressISBN: 9781399813884Number of pages: 400Dimensions: 240 x 156 mm
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'A smart,deft,meticulous,thoughtful writer,with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature'- Margaret Atwood
'One of the very greatest of our writers; poetic and profound prose with an incomparable feel for the texture of history'- Simon Schama
'Mantel was a queen of literature... her reign was long,varied and uncontested'- Maggie O'Farrell
'Mantel bristled with intelligence,looked at everything,saw everything... with the uneasy energy of her early life,Mantel made rigorous and unsettling work about history,the body and the unknowable'- Anne Enright
Hilary Mantel
One of Britain's greatest living novelists,Hilary Mantel published her first novel,Eight Months on Ghazzah Street,in 1988. She is a two-time winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction for her novels,Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies,Mantel is currently working on a third part to the sequence,titled The Mirror and the Light. Her other novels include: Fludd,A Place of Greater Safety,A Change of Climate, Beyond Black and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher as well as the autobiography Giving up the Ghost.
Visit the Hilary Mantel author page
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