Book description
From the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of 'Wolf Hall', a wry,
shocking and beautiful memoir of childhood, ghosts, hauntings, illness
and family.
At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my
great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is
beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny
flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is
barely ten o'clock and she is getting the cabbage on. 'Hello, Our
Ilary,' she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration
doesn't stretch to the 'H'.
Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's wry,
shocking and uniquely unusual five-part autobiography of childhood,
ghosts, illness and family.
It opens in 1995 with 'A Second Home', in which Mantel describes the
death of her stepfather, a death which leaves her deeply troubled by the
unresolved events of childhood. 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' begins
in typical, gripping Mantel fashion: 'Two of my relatives have died by
fire.' Set during the 1950s, it takes the reader into the muffled
consciousness of her early childhood, culminating with the birth of a
younger brother and the strange candlelit ceremony of her mother's
'churching'. In 'The Secret Garden' Mantel moves to a haunted house and
mysteriously gains a stepfather. When she is almost eleven, her family
flee the gossips and the ghosts, and resolve to start a new life.
'Smile' is an account of teenage perplexity, in a household where the
keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Convent school provides a
certain sanctuary, with tacit assistance from the fearsome 'Top Nun.' In
the final section, the author tells how, through medical
misunderstandings and neglect, she came to be childless, and how the
ghosts of the unborn, like chances missed or pages unturned, have come
to haunt her life as a writer. 'Like Lorna Sage's BAD BLOOD, GIVING UP
THE GHOST is a story of childhood that is also a piece of history.
Hilary Mantel's self-portrait is a masterpiece of wit, but it conjures
up a time and a place and an epoch of female experience with razor-edged
sobriety. That past, so thoroughly vanished, is made to live again here
- disclosed, cannily and heartbreakingly, as once it too yielded up its
author's mind.' Rachel Cusk
'What a remarkable writer she is. She is piercingly, even laceratingly
observant, and every remembered detail has the sharpness of a good
photograph. And yet for all its brilliance of detail and its black
comedy the memoir is heavy with atmophere. It's a very startling and
daring memoir; the more I read it the more unsettling it becomes.' Helen Dunmore
'I was riveted. It's raw, it's distressing and it's full of piercing
insights into a first-rate novelist's mind.' Margaret Forster
A stunning evocation of an ill-fitting childhood and a womanhood
blighted by medical ineptitude. Hilary Mantel's frank and beautiful
memoir is impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
Clare Boylan Hilary Mantel is the author of thirteen books , including
A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY, BEYOND BLACK, and the memoir GIVING UP THE
GHOST. Her two most recent novels, WOLF HALL and its sequel BRING UP THE
BODIES, have both been awarded The Man Booker Prize - an unprecedented
achievement.
