The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Description

A brilliant - and rather transgressive - collection of short stories from the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light. Including a new story 'The School of English'. Nothing is as it seems. Childhood cruelty is played out behind bushes. Both the living and the dead commute to Waterloo station. Staying in for the plumber turns into a potentially fatal waiting game. And in 'The School of English', panic grips a household behind the stucco facade of a Notting Hill mansion. All that is clear and constant in these bracingly subversive stories is Hilary Mantel's distinctive style and wit.

Hilary Mantel is the author of fourteen books, including A Place Of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up The Ghost, and the short-story collection The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher. Her two most recent novels, Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies, have both been awarded the Man Booker Prize - an unprecedented achievement.

'An exhilarating, if dark, collection ... 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' is a small triumph: a lesson in artfully controlled savagery' Sunday Times 'Remarkably good: taut, engaging and shocking ... acutely observed' Evening Standard 'I would recommend the brilliantly chilling ...The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher over most other long or short works this year.' Telegraph, Books of the Year 'What a fabulously nasty concoction Hilary Mantel has served up ... It's a fugu fish of a book; parts of which will leave you dizzily elated, while other parts may make you very ill indeed ... The venom is distilled, bottled and dripped like slowly staining bitters into the cocktail of the entertainment ... That title story, wickedly good, is alone worth the price of admission to the book' Simon Schama, Financial Times 'The best stories in the collection ... combine sharp observation and sly wit with a subtle burrowing into the recesses of her protagonists' heads. The darker stories recall both the metaphysical speculations of Jorge Luis Borges and the trickery of Roald Dahl' Mail on Sunday 'Infused with Mantel's almost lush evocations of isolation and distress ... All in all, these are alluring portraits of interior disquiet' Observer 'No one else quite sounds like Mantel in this vein, although a top-level summit of Muriel Spark and Alan Bennett might conceivably come close. Mantel takes absolutely nothing on trust. Bodies can, and will, malfunction; ditto minds, and marriages. Malice, power or simple chance may always undermine the ground beneath your feet' Independent 'These are the sticky slices of suburban noir that Mantel served up so well in her pre-Wolf Hall output and they never fail to deliver' The Times 'Much of Mantel's glorious power comes from her unsentimental, forensic gaze and willingness to describe the uncomfortable ... Mantel's brutally dissecting eye is much in evidence here ... Her prose is sublime ... the glittering details exquisite' Independent on Sunday