Following the Man Booker Prize-winning ‘Wolf Hall‘ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies‘, the final part of Mantel’s acclaimed trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, ‘The Mirror and the Light’ isn’t due to be published until the end of next year at the very earliest. Presumably brought out to keep Mantel’s fans satisfied in the meantime, ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ is a collection of ten short stories, her second collection after ‘Learning to Talk’ was published in 2003. Having read three of Mantel’s novels and her memoir, I was keen to see how her shorter works of fiction compared.
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Tag Archives: Wolf Hall
Books I Thought I Would Struggle With But Didn’t
Generally, I avoid picking up books which I don’t think I will enjoy. However, that doesn’t mean I always have super high expectations for everything I read. Here is my list of books I initially thought I would struggle with but actually liked a lot.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
I wasn’t sure if I would like a book as ‘philosophical’ as this one but I did. It’s still a pretty weird book and might be viewed as pretentious, but as I said in my review, it’s a very readable sort of pretentiousness. Continue reading
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Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
‘Giving Up the Ghost’ is Hilary Mantel’s memoir first published in 2003, six years before she won the Booker Prize in 2009 for ‘Wolf Hall‘. The ghosts in question are the ghost of her step-father, the ghost she saw in the garden at the age of seven and the ghost of the child she could never have. Continue reading
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The Man Booker Prize 2012
So Hilary Mantel has done it again. ‘Bring Up The Bodies’ has been crowned the Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012. Mantel won the Booker Prize for ‘Wolf Hall’ in 2009, the first part of her trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, so this makes her the first woman and the first British person to win it twice. I’m sure I’m not alone in passing on many congratulations to Mantel for this huge and much deserved achievement. Continue reading
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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
NOTE TO SELF: Do not start reading giant, complex historical novels on the day your final university exam results are due to be released. Absorbing the content of such novels in the hours before such crucial, life-altering events will prove extremely difficult if not impossible. Moreover, the shocking discovery that you did indeed achieve a First Class Honours degree against all the odds (such as developing an extreme blogging addiction in the final weeks of the course instead of diligently revising French verbs for inevitably soul-destroying translation exams) will result in the aforementioned giant, complex historical novel being abandoned for longer than you anticipated and therefore will be quite hard to get back into once you have recovered from the realisation that maybe, just maybe, you will one day get a Proper Job like a Real Person and that some may even consider you to be a semi-valuable member of society once your good-for-nothing-student days are behind you.
This has been my experience of reading ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel this week. Continue reading
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