The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher Synopsis
A brilliant - and rather transgressive - collection of short stories from the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies'. Hilary Mantel is one of Britain's most accomplished and acclaimed writers. In these ten bracingly subversive tales, all her gifts of characterisation and observation are fully engaged, summoning forth the horrors so often concealed behind everyday facades. Childhood cruelty is played out behind the bushes in 'Comma'; nurses clash in 'Harley Street' over something more than professional differences; and in the title story, staying in for the plumber turns into an ambiguous and potentially deadly waiting game. Whether set in a claustrophobic Saudi Arabian flat or on a precarious mountain road in Greece, these stories share an insight into the darkest recesses of the spirit. Displaying all of Mantel's unmistakable style and wit, they reveal a great writer at the peak of her powers.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780007580972 |
| Publication date: |
25th September 2014 |
| Author: |
Hilary Mantel |
| Publisher: |
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
242 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Hilary Mantel Press Reviews
From the reviews of Wolf Hall:
'A stunning book ... I can't think of anything since Middlemarch which so convincingly builds a world.'
Diana Athill
'A magnificent achievement'
Sarah Dunant From the reviews of Bring Up the Bodies:
'She has recast the most essential period of our modern English history ... the greatest modern English prose writer'
Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of the judges for the Man Booker Prize 2012
'Simply exceptional ... I envy anyone who hasn't yet read it'
Sandra Parsons, Daily Mail
'In another league. This ongoing story of Henry VIII's right-hand man is the finest piece of historical fiction I have ever read. A staggering achievement'
Sarah Crompton, Sunday Telegraph
'Succeeds brilliantly in every particle ... it's an imaginative achievement to exhaust superlatives'
Spectator
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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