THE FINAL BOOK FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST WRITERS
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.
Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping 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 that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is her legendary essay “Royal Bodies,” on our endless fascination with the current royal family.
From her unusual childhood to her all-consuming interest in 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 luminous words, through “messages from people I used to be.” Filled with her singular wit and wisdom, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.
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Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) was a #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time winner of the Booker Prize for her bestselling novels, Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won critical acclaim around the globe. She wrote more than a dozen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost.
Anne Enright is the author of two volumes of stories and several novels, including The Forgotten Waltz and The Gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize.
Sarah Waters is the New York Times bestselling author of The Little Stranger, The Night Watch, Fingersmith, Affinity, and Tipping the Velvet. She has three times been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, twice been a finalist for the Orange Prize, and was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists, among other distinctions.