This book took me an absurdly long time to read, but man, was it worth it. Hilary Mantel's brain is some sort of freakish treasure - every time I read her, I am simultaneously elated by the beautiful things she creates and depressed that I will never be able to write the way she does. She breaks ...
I don't read thrillers, and this novel by the "Wolf Hall" and "Bring up the Bodies" master is not a thriller, but the way it dilated and slowed right when you knew something terrible was going to happen was so terrifying that I actually couldn't continue (for a few hours anyway). This not-thrille...
Here’s the perfect set-up for a black comedy: an overweight, repressed psychic named Alison must confront her own ghosts—and not just symbolic ghosts, like mere stand-ins of desires and secrets, but actual, real ghosts—the Fiends she calls them. What makes Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel really ...
After gorging on Every Day Is Mother's Day, the prequel to this book (and being a bit disappointed, really, by the "horror" elements of the former,) I took my time with this novel, savoring Ms Mantel's clean, sharp prose and enjoying the contrast in the same characters written of previously, enge...
It took me some time to read this horrifying novel by Hilary Mantel, not because it isn't well-written or compelling, but because often it's simply so painful to read. There is a mystery, a shadowy bit of skulduggery that gathers force toward the end, but the impact of the book is not in this art...
This review could be 20 paragraphs long, that's how personal a connection this novel had for me in reaction. More than just enjoyable, at least 1/2 was outright LOL, literally. The descriptive mastery! Not an easy read, as there are 4 comparative context metaphors or some kind of nuance allusion ...
And along came Muriel...‘Every day is Mother’s Day’ is the story of Evelyn and Muriel Axon, a mother and daughter who live a reclusive life in the house that Muriel was born. Evelyn has raised Muriel alone since the death of her husband, Clifford when Muriel was 6 years old, Clifford unfortunatel...
This book was published in 1989 long before Mantel became a household name (in households that pay attention to the winners of the Booker Prize), indeed when I first read it she was relatively unknown. It was the second book of hers that I read, the first being Beyond Black another magic realism ...
Hughes lapses into beautiful writing on occasion, but I had too many unanswered questions. Well, maybe not that many, but: why this story arc? It seemed so strange; we barely get established and acquaint ourselves with the above-stairs and below-stairs characters in Wales and England before the...
How interesting -- looking up this book, which is not quite the edition I read it in, or not the same picture anyway, I realised how many different books there are with this title. Anyway, this is the only Giving Up the Ghost I have read.And it's good.It's also the only Hilary Mantel I've read, t...