Giving up the ghost a memoir
"In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel is a fierce, self-possessed child, schooling herself in "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay" and convinced that she will become a boy at age four. Catholic school comes as a rude distraction from her rich inner life. At home, where fathers and stepfathers...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Picador,
2004.
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| Edition: | First Picador edition. |
| Subjects: | |
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Requests: 2
| Summary: | "In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel is a fierce, self-possessed child, schooling herself in "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay" and convinced that she will become a boy at age four. Catholic school comes as a rude distraction from her rich inner life. At home, where fathers and stepfathers come and go at strange, overlapping intervals, the keeping of secrets becomes a way of life. Her late teens bring her to law school in London and then to Sheffield a lover and then a husband. She acquires a persistent pain-which also shifts and travels-that over the next decade will subject her to destructive drugs, patronizing psychiatry, and, finally, at age twenty-seven, to an ineffective and irrevocable surgery. There will be no children instead she has "a ghost of possibility, a paper baby, a person who slipped between the lines." Hormone treatments alter her body beyond recognition. And in the middle of it all, she begins one novel, and then another. Hilary Mantel was born to write about the paradoxes that shimmer at the edges of our perception. Dazzling, wry, and visceral, Giving Up the Ghost is a deeply compelling book that will bring new converts to Mantel's dark genius."--Pub. desc. (Henry Holt, American ed.). |
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| Item Description: | "A John Macrae book." |
| Physical Description: | 223 pages ; 21 cm |
| ISBN: | 0312423624 9780312423629 |
| Author Notes: | She has written numerous books including Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, A Place of Greater Safety, A Change of Climate, The Giant, O'Brien, Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir, and Beyond Black. She made The New York Times Best Seller List with her title The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. She has won several awards for her work including the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize for Fludd; the 1996 Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love, the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, and the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Bring up the Bodies. Book three of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was named the best book of 2020 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, and others. Hilary Mantel died on September 22, 2022 from complications of a stroke. She was 70. (Bowker Author Biography) |
