Beyond Black

A Novel

Hilary Mantel

Picador

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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
 
Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. This is Hilary Mantel at her finest--insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read.

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Beyond Black
oneTravelling: the dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway, its wastes looping London: the margin's scrub grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon. Four o'clock: light sinking over the orbital road. Teatime in Enfield, night falling on Potter's Bar. There are nights when you don't want to do it, but you have to do it anyway. Nights when you look down from the stage and see closed stupid faces.

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Reviews

Praise for Beyond Black

"The strangest, creepiest, most sorrow-and-pity-inducing book I've read for a very long time . . . [and] a great ghost story. A chilling masterpiece."--Philip Pullman
 
"A terrible and swirling horror-comedy about a very fat medium on the perimeter of the M25, haunted by mean and nasty spirits, veering between damnation and the trivial."--A. S. Byatt
 
"Funny and harrowing. . . A great comic novel. Hilary Mantel's humor, like Flannery O'Connor's, is so far beyond black it becomes a kind of light."--The New York Times Book Review
 
"Beautifully written . . . Strange, funny, and affecting . . . Mantel is . . . the possessor of a peerless prose style."--John Banville
 
"Spooky, smart, and deep."--Claire Dederer, New York magazine
 
"[One of] my favourite [books] of the year . . . More people really need to get with the concept that Mantel is one of the best writers in England."--Zadie Smith
 
"Her finest [novel] . . . Mantel's writing is so exact and brilliant that, in itself, it seems an act of survival, even redemption."--The New Yorker
 
"Original and deeply dark . . . New and compelling . . . With Beyond Black [Mantel] shows us how fiction can lift us into the extraordinary."--The Washington Post Book World
 
"Grimly seductive [work from] a writer of dark extremities. [Mantel] performs as if from the depths of a well, her prolonged bleakness pierced by splinters of beauty and treacherous wit. . . . Imperceptibly, artfully, Mantel has elevated her material monsters into metaphysical monsters."--The Boston Globe
 
"Inventive, delightful, subversive [and] dead serious . . . Hilary Mantel has taken . . . those moments between sleep and waking, when we hardly know who we are, or why, and turned them into a novel that makes the unbelievable believable. . . . This is a book out of the unconscious, where the best novels come from."--Faye Weldon, The Guardian (U.K.)

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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

Beyond Black
A Novel
Hilary Mantel
Award

Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction - Nominee

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Picador
April 2006
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780312426057
ISBN10: 0312426054
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 432 pages
$16.00
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Hardcover

Learn more about this edition
Hardcover
Henry Holt and Co.
A John Macrae Book
May 2005
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780805073560
ISBN10: 0805073566
6 1/8 x 9 /14 inches, 384 pages
$26.00

e-Book Agency

Learn more about this edition
e-Book Agency
Henry Holt and Co.
A John Macrae Book
April 2006
e-Book Agency
ISBN: 9781429900638
ISBN10: 1429900636
384 pages
$9.99
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