Showing results by author "Hilary Mantel" in All Categories

By 1535, Thomas Cromwell is far from his humble origins. Chief minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church. But Henry’s actions have forced England into dangerous isolation, and Anne has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. When Henry visits Wolf Hall, Cromwell watches as Henry falls in love with the silent, plain Jane Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king’s pleasure, but the safety of the nation.

Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, a maker of maps, but when her husband's work takes her to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map the Kingdom's areas of internal darkness. The regime is corrupt and harsh, and the streets are not a woman's territory; so she becomes confined in her flat. As her days empty of certainty and purpose, her life becomes a blank – waiting to be filled by violence and disaster.

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. 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.

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of 20 years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell.

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 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

Fetherhoughton is a dreary town in 1950s northern England. Father Angwin has lost his faith. Sister Philomena strains against convent life. The inhabitants of the town go about their lives in a haze. Then a stranger appears, bringing with him the hint of something new. But who is Fludd? An angel come to shake the dwellers from their stupor, or is he the devil himself, a wanderer of the darkest places in the human heart?

In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out.

In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “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.

Charles O’Brien, Irish bard and giant: The cynical are moved by his flights of romance; the craven stirred by his tales of epic deeds. The Surprising Irish Giant may be the sensation of the season but only his compatriots seem to attend to his mythic powers of invention. John Hunter, celebrated surgeon and anatomist, buys dead men from the gallows and babies’ corpses by the inch. Where is a man as unique as The Giant to hide his bones when he is yet alive?

Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital ring road with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, passing on messages from beloved dead ancestors. But behind her plump, smiling persona hides a desperate woman: she knows the terrors the next life holds but must conceal them from her wide-eyed clients. At the same time she is plagued by spirits from her own past, who infiltrate her body and home, becoming stronger and nastier the more she resists....

One of the 21st century's most celebrated authors, Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: for 2009's Wolf Hall, the first in her phenomenally successful Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The third novel in the series, 2020's The Mirror and the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. This collection includes three of her best works of contemporary fiction, ranging from the Gothic to the blackly comic.

Ralph and Anna Eldred live in the big Red House in Norfolk, raising their four children and devoting their lives to charity. But the constant flood of 'good souls and sad cases' welcomed into their home hides the growing crises in their own family. From the violent townships of South Africa to the windswept countryside of Norfolk, this is an epic yet subtle family saga about what happens when trust is broken...

England 1520: Henry VIII. ist noch immer ohne männlichen Thronfolger, was für ihn eine persönliche wie politische Katastrophe ist. Ohne einen Erben droht dem Königreich ein verheerender Bürgerkrieg. Henry VIII. will daher seine Ehe mit Katharina von Aragón annullieren lassen und seine Geliebte Anne Boleyn heiraten. Das sorgt für heftigen Widerstand in Rom und in Europa. In dieser heiklen Situation sind nun die Fähigkeiten Thomas Cromwells gefragt. Mit Bestechung, Einschüchterung und Charme steigt er zum wichtigen Vertrauten Henrys auf. Der Emporkömmling sieht sich bald von Feinden umgeben wie von einem Rudel Wölfe.

It is London, 1970. Carmel McBain, in her first term at university, has cut free of her childhood roots in the north. Among the gossiping, flirtatious girls of Tonbridge Hall, she begins her experiments in life and love. But the year turns. The mini-skirt falls out of style and an era of concealment begins. Carmel's world darkens, and tragedy waits in the wings.

Evelyn and Muriel Axon, mother and daughter, lead a haunted existence. Objects of horror to their neighbours, they evade or terrorise any social worker who crosses their path. Inside their house, they pursue a covert persecution of each other, shrinking from the unseen occupants of their spare room. But change is in the air… Every Day is Mother's Day is a merciless comedy of colliding lives: of sex, death, madness, adultery and the social services.

From the double Man Booker Prize-winner, a savagely funny tale that revisits the characters from the much-loved Every Day is Mother’s Day. Muriel Axon is about to re-enter the lives of Colin Sidney and Isabel Field. It is ten years since her last tangle with them, but for Muriel this is not time enough. There are still scores to be settled, truths to be faced and vengeance to be wreaked.

England 1520: Henry VIII. ist noch immer ohne männlichen Thronfolger, was für ihn eine persönliche wie politische Katastrophe ist. Ohne einen Erben droht dem Königreich ein verheerender Bürgerkrieg. Henry VIII. will daher seine Ehe mit Katharina von Aragón annullieren lassen und seine Geliebte Anne Boleyn heiraten. Das sorgt für heftigen Widerstand in Rom und in Europa. In dieser heiklen Situation sind nun die Fähigkeiten Thomas Cromwells gefragt.

This sharp, funny collection of stories begins in the 1950s in an insular northern village 'scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.' The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In Third Floor Rising' she watches, dazzled, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity. With a deceptively light touch, Mantel locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.

Wenn du bei einer Hinrichtung nicht die Wahrheit sagen kannst, wann wirst du sie jemals sagen können? England 1536: Mit der Hinrichtung Anne Boleyns ist Thomas Cromwell mehr denn je der engste Vertraute Henrys VIII. Loyal gegenüber dem König, gerissen im Umgang mit Verbündeten, gnadenlos gegen Feinde triumphiert der Mann aus einfachen Verhältnissen über alle. Doch was wird geschehen, wenn seine Feinde erstarken und sie den König auf ihre Seite ziehen?

Drei junge Männer in den Wirren der Französischen Revolution. Da ist Georges Danton: ehrgeizig, energisch, hoch verschuldet. Maximilien Robespierre: gewissenhaft und furchtsam. Und schließlich Camille Desmoulins: ein Rhetorikgenie, aber auch wankelmütig und unzuverlässig. Während die drei in den berauschenden Sog der Macht geraten, erkennen sie, dass ihre Ideale auch eine dunkle Seite haben. Das monumentale elfstündige WDR-Hörspiel - bis in die kleinste Rolle erstklassig und prominent besetzt - erzählt packend und hochemotional von einem der erschütterndsten Ereignisse der Weltgeschichte.