About
A Memoir of My Former Self Synopsis
'I breathed in stories, as soon as I breathed in air. Sometimes I think I wasn't born, but I just came out of an ink blot.' 'Mantel's idiosyncratic and magisterial voice comes through on every page, carrying readers across an astonishing array of subject matter with ease.
As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.'
A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Mantel's subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels - revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England - and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V. S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is a selection of her film reviews - from When Harry Met Sally to RoboCop - and, published for the first time, her stunning Reith Lectures, which explore the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life.
From her unique childhood to her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall Trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel's life in her own dazzling words, 'messages from people I used to be.' Compelling, often very funny, always luminous, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781399813884 |
| Publication date: |
19th October 2023 |
| Author: |
Hilary Mantel |
| Publisher: |
John Murray Publishers Ltd an imprint of John Murray Press |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
400 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Biographies & Autobiographies
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| Other Genres: |
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Press Reviews
Hilary Mantel Press Reviews
'A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature' -- Margaret Atwood
'One of the very greatest of our writers; poetic and profound prose with an incomparable feel for the texture of history' -- Simon Schama
'Mantel was a queen of literature . . . her reign was long, varied and uncontested' -- Maggie O’Farrell
'Mantel bristled with intelligence, looked at everything, saw everything . . . With the uneasy energy of her early life, Mantel made rigorous and unsettling work about history, the body and the unknowable' -- Anne Enright
'In this dazzling posthumous collection of previously published and original writings . . . Mantel's idiosyncratic and magisterial voice comes through on every page, carrying readers across an astonishing array of subject matter with ease. This is a treasure' - Publishers Weekly
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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