Hilary Mantel Press Reviews
'The most powerful of her novels, a near-faultless masterpiece of pathos, observation and feeling ... She writes like an angel.' Sunday Telegraph
'Hilary Mantel is a wonderfully unsurprised dissector of human motivation, and in An Experiment in Love she has written a bleak tale seamed with crackling wit.' Helen Dunmore, Observer
'Funny, tragic and wondefully perceptive, this is a book to be treasured, for the sheer quality of its writing and for its honesty.' Independent
'Mantel writes prose of imperturbable aplomp, crisp with irony and highlighted with deftly places, elegantly surprising images ... she has a penchant for caustic, spiky heroines and a sardonic ear for dialogue.' Sunday Times
'My favourite novel of the year: An Experiment in Love is written with subtle perceptiveness, sharp wit and canny wisdom' Margaret Forster, Independent
'Cool unsentimental, and unassumingly authoritative.' Anita Brookner, Spectator
'The time is 1970, and it is wonderfully well evoked ... The skill with which Mantel manages her time-shifts, the precision of her writing, the acuteness of her observations, the seriousness of her themes, and the way in which she weaves them into a coherant whole, make this an unusually satisfying novel.' Allan Massie, Scotsman
'An Experiment in Love has much to say about its turbulant era, and is replete with the atmosphere of the cusp, with the prospect of irreversible change ... It is also a profoundly sad novel, to which Mantel's liberal sense of comedy and dazzling acuity for metaphor add an almost excruciating flavour.' Rachel Cusk, The Times
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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