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Goldsboro Books

9780007148417

Giving Up the Ghost: A memoir

Giving Up the Ghost: A memoir

by Hilary Mantel

Publisher Fourth Estate

Genre: Non-Fiction

Released:

  • Unsigned
  • UK First Edition
  • First Printing
  • Hardcover


Regular price £175.00
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  • Book Condition & Notes

    All of our books that a have dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

About the book

Like Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, Giving Up the Ghost is a story of childhood that is also a piece of history. A masterpiece. Rachel Cusk

Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's wry, shocking and beautifully written autobiography.

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 mothers churching. Mantel then 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. Teenage perplexity displaces childhood dreams of Arthurian knights as her home turns into a place 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. After making good her escape to university and her own marriage, the author reveals 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.

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About the Author

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is an English writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories.


She has twice been awarded the Booker Prize, the first time for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and secondly for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second instalment of the Cromwell trilogy.


Mantel was the first woman to receive the award twice, following in the footsteps of J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, and J.G. Farrell (who posthumously won the Lost Man Booker Prize). The third instalment to the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was released on 5th March 2020 in the UK.

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