An Experiment in Love

Description

'The most powerful of her novels, a near-faultless masterpiece of pathos, observation and feeling ...She writes like an angel. ' Sunday TelegraphIt was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina and Julianne were escaping the dreary north for a London University hall of residence. Awaiting them was a winter of new preoccupations -- sex, politics, food and fertility -- and a pointless grotesque tragedy of their own.

Hilary Mantel was born in Derbyshire. She was educated at a convent and later studied law. After ten years abroad in Africa and the Middle East, she returned to Britain in 1985 to make a career as a writer. She is the author of eight novels. Her memoir, GIVING UP THE GHOST, and a collection of short stories, LEARNING TO TALK, were published in 2003.

'Hilary Mantel is a wonderfully unsurprised dissector of human motivation, and in An Experiment in Love she has written a bleak tale seamed with crackling wit.' Helen Dunmore, Observer'Funny, tragic and wondefully perceptive, this is a book to be treasured, for the sheer quality of its writing and for its honesty.' Independent'Mantel writes prose of imperturbable aplomp, crisp with irony and highlighted with deftly places, elegantly surprising images ... she has a penchant for caustic, spiky heroines and a sardonic ear for dialogue.' Sunday Times'My favourite novel of the year: An Experiment in Love is written with subtle perceptiveness, sharp wit and canny wisdom' Margaret Forster, Independent'Cool unsentimental, and unassumingly authoritative.' Anita Brookner, Spectator'The time is 1970, and it is wonderfully well evoked ... The skill with which Mantel manages her time-shifts, the precision of her writing, the acuteness of her observations, the seriousness of her themes, and the way in which she weaves them into a coherant whole, make this an unusually satisfying novel.' Allan Massie, Scotsman'An Experiment in Love has much to say about its turbulant era, and is replete with the atmosphere of the cusp, with the prospect of irreversible change ... It is also a profoundly sad novel, to which Mantel's liberal sense of comedy and dazzling acuity for metaphor add an almost excruciating flavour.' Rachel Cusk, The Times