About
Giving up the Ghost Synopsis
Giving Up the Ghost is the shocking and beautiful memoir, from the author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light 'Giving up the Ghost' is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's uniquely unusual five-part autobiography.
Opening in 1995 with 'A Second Home', Mantel describes the death of her stepfather which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of her childhood. In 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' Mantel takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating in the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelight ceremony of her mother's 'churching'.
In 'Smile', an account of teenage perplexity, Mantel describes a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Mantel explains how through a series of medical misunderstandings and neglect she came to be childless and how the ghosts of the unborn like chances missed or pages unturned, have come to haunt her life as a writer.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780007142729 |
| Publication date: |
1st June 2004 |
| Author: |
Hilary Mantel |
| Publisher: |
Fourth Estate Ltd an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
8 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Biographies & Autobiographies
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| Other Genres: |
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Press Reviews
Hilary Mantel Press Reviews
'She is by turns facetious, matter-of-fact, visionary and comical but always totally riveting.' Daily Telegraph
'Simply astonishing - clear and true.' Guardian
'An extraordinary story, sometimes comic, often grim, but most importantly it is a story of survival.' Spectator
'A masterpiece of wit...[the] past, so thoroughly vanished, is made to live again here.' Rachel Cusk
'What a remarkable writer she is. She is piercingly, even laceratingly observant ... 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 first-rate novelist's mind.' Margaret Forster
'A stunning evocation of an ill-fitting childhood and a womanhood blighted by medical ineptitude. Hilary Mantel's frank and beautiful memoir is impossible to put down and impossible to forget.' Clare Boylan
Author
About Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel is the first woman and the first British author to win the Man Booker prize twice and the first author ever to win the Man Booker Prize and Costa Book Award in the same year. At 60, she is only the third double winner alongside J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. She is also the first person to win the prize for two novels in a trilogy, following her success in 2009 with Wolf Hall.
Hilary Mantel was born in northern Derbyshire in 1952. She was educated at a convent school in Cheshire and went on to the LSE and Sheffield University, where she studied law. After university she was briefly a social worker in a geriatric hospital, and much later used her experiences in her novels Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. In 1977 she went to live in Botswana with her husband, then a geologist. In 1982 they moved on to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where she would set her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.
Her first novel was published in 1985, and she returned to the UK the following year. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing, and became the film critic of the Spectator. Her fourth novel, Fludd, was awarded the Cheltenham Festival Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Prize. Her fifth novel, A Place of Greater Safety, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
A Change of Climate, published in 1993, is the story of an East Anglian family, former missionaries, torn apart by conflicts generated in Southern Africa in the early years of Apartheid. An Experiment in Love published in 1995, is a story about childhood and university life, set in London in 1970. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.
Photograph © Jane Bown
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