Hilary Mantel

One of the most accomplished, acclaimed, and garlanded writers, Hilary Mantel delivers a brilliant collection of contemporary stories

Read an Excerpt from The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel’s trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display.

Stories of dislocation and family fracture, of whimsical infidelities and sudden deaths with sinister causes, brilliantly unsettle the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way.

Cutting to the core of human experience, Mantel brutally and acutely writes about marriage, class, family, and sex. Unpredictable, diverse, and sometimes shocking, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers.

Watch the trailer for Wolf Hall starring Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn.

Wolf Hall premiers 1/21 on BBC Two in the UK, and 4/5 on PBS Masterpiece in the USA.

How Shall I Know You? - An E-Short

In How Shall I Know You?, a melancholic and ailing writer reluctantly travels east of London to give a lecture before a literary society. Mr. Simister, the organization’s secretary, lures the world-weary novelist turned biographer with promises of a modest stipend and lodging at a charming bed-and-breakfast for her trouble. Nevertheless, on that rainy day she meets Mr. Simister at the train station, she wonders why she ever agreed to come in the first place. Driving past steel-shuttered windows and Day-Glo banners, Mr. Simister takes the writer to her hotel for the evening, which turns out to be crumbling and isolated rather than picturesque. As she crosses the threshold into the dank stench of Eccles House she is faced with the feral porter, Louise, and suffers through an evening that may be more than she bargained for.

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Wolf Hall

WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
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 oppose 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?

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Bring Up the Bodies

WINNER OF THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
Though he battled for years to marry her—a story told in Wolf Hall—Henry is now disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son, and her sharp intelligence alienates his old friends and the noble families of England. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over a few terrifying weeks, Cromwell ensnares her in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour waits her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle, and to defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must now ally himself with his enemies. What price will he pay for Anne’s head?

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Beyond Black

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.

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Giving Up the Ghost

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.

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The Giant O’Brien

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. 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.

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An Experiment in Love

It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence. Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with recollections of her childhood and an ever difficult relationship with her longtime schoolmate Karina, Carmel reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper. When these bright but confused young women land in late 1960s London, they are confronted with a slew of new preoccupations--sex, politics, food, and fertility--and a pointless grotesque tragedy of their own.

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A Change of Climate

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.

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A Place of Greater Safety

It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden--and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. In the swells of revolution, they each taste the addictive delights of power, and the price that must be paid for it.

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Fludd

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. 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.

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Eight Months on Ghazza Street

When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the floor above, and seeing the flitting shadows of men on the stairwell. It’s all in her imagination, she’s told by her neighbors; the upstairs flat is empty, no one uses the roof. But Frances knows otherwise, and day by day, her sense of foreboding grows even as her sense of herself begins to disintegrate.

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Vacant Possession

Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon did her ma in, ten years of living in a mental asylum. But Muriel has not forgotten her welfare worker, Isabel, or her neighbor, Colin. Nor has she forgiven. There are still scores to be settled-and vengeance to be wreaked. In a novel that is wildly funny and daringly wicked, Mantel brings the full force of her black humor to bear on a cast of characters that is by turns wacky and malevolent.

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Every Day is Mother's Day

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.

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Hilary Mantel is the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize for her best-selling novels, Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies—an unprecedented achievement. The Royal Shakespeare Company recently adapted Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies for the stage to colossal critical acclaim and a BBC/Masterpiece six-part adaption of the novels will broadcast in 2015.

The author of fourteen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving up the Ghost, she is currently at work on the third installment of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy.

“Mantel’s stories have their own special tang and quidditas. Mantel is such a funny and intelligent and generously untethered writer that part of what one’s praise must mean is that if you’re intelligent and quirky enough to take the book up at all…she’s got quirks enough of her own to match you, if not raise you 10.”

—New York Times Book Review

“A new Hilary Mantel book is an Event with a capital 'E'.... Heads always tend to roll — figuratively and otherwise — in Mantel's writing. Hers is a brusque and brutal world leavened with humor — humor that's available in one shade only: black.... makes a permanent dent in a reader's consciousness because of Mantel's striking language and plots twists, as well as the Twilight Zone-type mood she summons up...breathtaking.”

—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“[Mantel's] writing is cinematically exquisite… you can't help but get sucked in.”

—The Chicago Tribune

“Hilary Mantel has escaped from King Henry VIII’s court.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“[A] barnburner of a title story...It’s not the plot that matters as much as the superb little touches with which Ms. Mantel punctuates it.”

—The New York Times

“A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat.... Some of the stories are so brief and twisted…they have a hint of the cruelty of Roald Dahl’s short stories (the ones that were definitely for grown-ups).... Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.”

—USA Today

“[Mantel] evokes a shadowy region where boundaries blur and what might have happened has equal weight with what actually occurred.... Despite the plethora of sharply observed social detail, her short stories always recognize other potential realities.... Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.”

—Washington Post

“Mantel is not just a novelist, however, but a great political novelist at the top of her game.”

—Salon

“Genius.”

—The Seattle Times

“Here are stories in which horror shudders between the high gothic of Grimm and the menacing quotidian. Oppression comes from air conditioners that ‘labor and hack’ and from ‘the smell of drains.’ Cruelty is made manifest by a wayward young girl who finds an even more outcast target in the form of a severely deformed child…. These are Ms. Mantel’s signature strokes – freaks made human and humans made freakish, and always with the expiation of a dark and judgmental humor.”

—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Best known for historical novels such as Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012), Mantel proves herself a skilled practitioner of short fiction as well…. ‘What would Anita Brookner do?’ asks one of Mantel’s protagonists. The answer, we’d like to think, is this: She’d read Mantel’s latest, and she’d delight in it.”

—Kirkus

“The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher delivers on its promises: the promise built by Mantel's reputation as one of the unquestionably great contemporary writers, the promise made by its shocking title, and the promise inherent in the genre of short stories...Mantel pokes and prods and scratches at our tiny collective wounds, opening them into something much bigger. Readers may find the stories uncomfortable, but also hard to put down.”

—A.V. Club

“Here is the Mantel of her earlier, darker kitchen-sink novels: harsh and comic, even derisive.”

—Los Angeles Times

“The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, untied from the historical record, she gives her characters freer rein to rattle their chains, and the results...are satisfyingly chilling.”

—The Daily Beast

“With ten stories unique, strange and tantalizing, Mantel shares her views poetically, harshly and with great love. A have to read.”

—Bustle.com

A New Yorker "Books to Watch Out For" September selection
People "Best Books of the Fall" pick
One of USA Today’s "30 Cool Books for Fall"
Selected for Vogue’s "Fall Books Guide: 10 Literary Things We’re Looking Forward To"
One of Flavorwire’s "Must Read Books for the Fall"
"Top 10 Literary Fiction" and "The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2014" by Publisher’s Weekly