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Giving Up the Ghost

A Memoir

Hilary Mantel

Picador

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ISBN10: 0312423624
ISBN13: 9780312423629

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240 Pages

$18.99

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A New York Times Notable Book

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. At nineteen, however, she acquired a persistent pain that led to destructive drugs and patronizing psychiatry, ending in an ineffective but irrevocable surgery. There would be no children; in herself she found instead one novel, and then another. This is a dazzling, wry, and visceral memoir that will bring new converts to Mantel's dark genius.

Reviews

Praise for Giving Up the Ghost

"Dazzling written . . . A highly unorthodox account of what is essentially unsayable about the inward uncharted life."—Joyce Carol Oates

"Mantel's angular wit is as unquenchable as her anger; the reading experience is reliably exhilarating because of the sheer excellence of the writing."—The New York Times Book Review

"Blazing insights [and] poetic discourses that rattle the soul . . . Mantel doesn't simply hit close to home, she knocks at our closets and opens our doors."—The Boston Globe

"Mantel's talents are stronger than her misfortunes . . . [This book comes] from the mind of a fine author, whose body has imposed its own terrible penances."—The Washington Post

"No book this year has given me more pleasure than Hilary Mantel's astonishing, ravishing memoir, Giving Up the Ghost."—Susan Sontag, The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year, 2003

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

GIVING UP THE GHOSTIt is a Saturday, late July 2000; we are in Reepham, Norfolk, at Owl Cottage. There's something we have to do today, but we are trying to postpone it. We need to go across the road to see Mr. Ewing; we need to ask...

About the author

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel twice won the Booker Prize, for her best-selling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won critical acclaim around the globe. Mantel authored over a dozen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost.

Els Zweerink

Read a New York Times interview