Hilary Mantel

Learning to Talk

Stories

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

A dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall trilogy. In the wake of Hilary Mantel's brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, Learning to Talk is a collection of loosely autobiographical stories that locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Absorbing and evocative, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village "scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues." For the young narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In "King Billy Is a Gentleman," the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. "Curved Is the Line of Beauty" is a story of friendship, faith and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In "Third Floor Rising," she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity. With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed. "A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel's narrators never tell everything they know, and that's why they're worth listening to, carefully." -USA Today "Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel's tales retain a faintly otherworldly air." -The Washington Post

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Henry Holt and Co.
• Seitenzahl: 176
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. Juni 2022
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 217mm x 147mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 268g
• ISBN-13: 9781250865366
• ISBN-10: 1250865360
• Artikelnr.: 62924929

Autorenporträt

Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.

© John Haynes

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
King Billy Is a Gentleman
Destroyed
Curved Is the Line of Beauty
Learning to Talk
Third Floor Rising
The Clean Slate
Giving Up the Ghost

Rezensionen

'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 atmosphere. 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