'I breathed in stories, as soon as I breathed in air. Sometimes I think I wasn't born, but I just came out of an ink blot.'As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Mantel's subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels - revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England - and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V. S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is a selection of her film reviews - from When Harry Met Sally to RoboCop - and, published for the first time, her stunning Reith Lectures, which explore the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life.From her unique childhood to her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall Trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel's life in her own dazzling words, 'messages from people I used to be.' Compelling, often very funny, always luminous, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.'A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature' Margaret Atwood
Hilary Mantel Book order







- 2023
- 2023
The magnificent final book from the bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy[Bokinfo].
- 2023
Sprechen lernen
Erzählungen
In ›Sprechen lernen‹ folgen wir Hilary Mantels Figuren ins England der Fünfziger- und Sechzigerjahre, betreten abgelegene Dörfer und Schrottplätze, besuchen altmodische Kaufhäuser und Klosterschulen. Es sind diese unscheinbaren, »von rauen Winden und derben Klatschmäulern geplagten Orte«, die zum Schauplatz eben jener Momente werden, die den jungen Protagonisten und Protagonistinnen noch lange in Erinnerung bleiben. Momente, die ihr Leben für immer prägen werden: das Verschwinden des leiblichen Vaters, die neue Identität der Mutter, das plötzliche Verlorengehen und das mühsame Sprechenlernen. Leicht, aber voller Hintersinn und mit gnadenlosem Witz gewährt uns die zweifache Booker-Preisträgerin einen erzählerischen Einblick in die Rätsel ihrer Kindheit und Jugend, ohne sie je in Gänze aufzulösen. »Diese Erzählungen bergen Welten, die so groß sind wie die der längsten Romane Mantels.« THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
- 2022
King Billy is a gentleman -- Destroyed -- Curved is the line of beauty -- Learning to talk -- Third floor rising -- The clean slate -- Giving up the ghost.
- 2022
The Wolf Hall Picture Book
- 128 pages
- 5 hours of reading
A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantel's bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy
- 2020
Mantel Pieces
- 304 pages
- 11 hours of reading
From the twice Booker Prize winner and internationally bestselling Hilary Mantel, a collection of writing essays, book reviews, memoir from over thirty years contributing to the London Review of Books In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly. This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next. Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britains last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her famous lecture, Royal Bodies, which caused a media frenzy, explores the place of royal women in society and our imagination. Here too are some of her LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and a confrontation with a circus strongman. Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers
- 2020
The Mirror and the Light
- 864 pages
- 31 hours of reading
Shortlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction 2020 The long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy. 'A masterpiece' Guardian 'It is a book not read, but lived' Telegraph 'Her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century' Observer 'If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?' England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith's son from Putney emerges from the spring's bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry's regime to breaking point, Cromwell's robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man's vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.
- 2018
Holbein's Sir Thomas More
- 56 pages
- 2 hours of reading
Illuminates one of Holbein's most famous portraits with a combination of scholarly scrutiny and fictional narrative.
- 2017
Révolution
L'idéal, Les désordres
L’Idéal Trois jeunes avocats ambitieux sont venus à Paris dans l’intention d’y faire carrière. Criblé de dettes, Jacques Danton rêve de gloire et de fortune. Maximilien de Robespierre est un jeune homme brillant. Sensible et épris de liberté, il souhaite ardemment changer le système inégalitaire de la France. Camille Desmoulins est un pamphlétaire de génie, fantasque et charmeur. Ces trois amis vont bientôt se retrouver au cœur de la Révolution. Après avoir goûté l’ivresse du pouvoir, que restera-t-il de leurs idéaux ? Et de leur amitié ? Les Désordres 1791. La Révolution a fait voler en éclats la société. Tout a changé : le régime, les lois, les dirigeants… Après avoir œuvré pour la Révolution et occupé le devant de la scène, Danton et Camille Desmoulins voient Robespierre devenu le chef de file du Comité de salut public qui a instauré la Terreur. Pourront-ils le ramener à la raison ? Inéluctablement, les révolutionnaires vont devenir les victimes de la terrifiante machine qu’ils ont eux-mêmes créée.
- 2017
De Cazalets: Lichte jaren
- 544 pages
- 20 hours of reading
De nadagen van het victoriaanse Engeland en de eerste onzekere jaren na het einde van de oorlog vormen de achtergrond van de vierdelige 'Cazalet-kronieken' van Elizabeth Jane Howard, die de periode 1937-1947 omspannen. Deel 1, 'Lichte jaren', begint eind jaren dertig, in de laatste gouden jaren voor het uitbreken van de Tweede Wereldoorlog. In de zomermaanden komen drie generaties van de familie Cazalet bij elkaar op hun familielandgoed vlak buiten Londen. Ze vullen hun dagen met kinderspelletjes in het bos, picknicken op het strand, gin-tonics in de tuin, feestmalen in de eetkamer. Het is een zonovergoten, onbekommerde tijd - maar onder de idyllische oppervlakte broeien er affaires en gefnuikte ambities; en de oorlog werpt zijn schaduw vooruit.




