An Experiment in Love

A Novel

Hilary Mantel

Picador

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A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
 
It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence. Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with recollections of her childhood and an ever difficult relationship with her longtime schoolmate Karina, Carmel reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper. When these bright but confused young women land in late 1960s London, they are confronted with a slew of new preoccupations--sex, politics, food, and fertility--and a pointless grotesque tragedy of their own.
 
Hilary Mantel's magnificent novel examines the pressures on women during the early days of contemporary feminism to excel--but not be too successful--in England's complex hierarchy of class and status.

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oneThis morning in the newspaper I saw a picture of Julia. She was standing on the threshold of her house in Highgate, where she receives her patients: a tall woman, wrapped in some kind of Indian shawl. There was a blur where her face should be, and yet I noted the confident set of her arms, and I could imagine her expression: professionally watchful, maternal, with that broad cold smile which I have known since I was eleven years old. In the foreground, a skeletal teenaged child tottered towards her, from a limousine parked at the kerb: Miss Linzi Simon, well-loved family entertainer and junior

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Praise for An Experiment in Love

"With all its brilliance, its sharpness, and its clear-eyed wit, An Experiment in Love is a haunting book."--Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review
 
"Mantel has several points in common with Graham Greene: she can make your flesh creep with horror and especially with the apprehension of it."--New York Review of Books
 
"Terrifically satisfying."--Elle

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About the Author

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the author of Wolf Hall, winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize. She is also the author of A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O'Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother's Day, and Vacant Possession. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she reviews for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. She lives in England.

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Available Formats and Book Details

An Experiment in Love
A Novel
Hilary Mantel

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Picador
June 2007
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780312426873
ISBN10: 0312426879
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 256 pages
$14.00
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Trade Paperback

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Trade Paperback
Henry Holt and Co.
Holt Paperbacks
July 1997
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780805052022
ISBN10: 080505202X
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 256 pages
$13.00

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Henry Holt and Co.
Holt Paperbacks
April 2007
e-Book Agency
ISBN: 9781429900591
ISBN10: 1429900598
256 pages
$9.99
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