Hilary Mantel
All Books By Hilary Mantel
A Change of Climate
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Hilary Mantel
- Length: 12 hours 13 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: June 21, 2013
- Language: English
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3.86(1809 ratings)
Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. Thirty years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and thirty years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.
... Read moreA Place of Greater Safety
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Hilary Mantel
- Length: 33 hours 53 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: June 28, 2013
- Language: English
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3.97(6798 ratings)
It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden–and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. In the swells of revolution, they each taste the addictive delights of power, and the price that must be paid for it.
... Read moreAn Experiment in Love
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Hilary Mantel
- Length: 7 hours 30 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: July 12, 2013
- Language: English
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3.66(1659 ratings)
Carmel McBain is the only child of working-class Irish-Catholic parents. Her mother aspires to something more for her than what life in their depressed mill town has to offer. She is ambitious for her daughter, determined that she slip through England’s rigid social barriers. And so, early on, she pushes Carmel, first to gain a scholarship to the local convent school, then to sit the exams for a place at London University. And Carmel does not disappoint. But success carries with it a fearful price. It sets her on a lonely journey that will take her as far as possible from where she began, uprooting her from the ties of class and place, of family and faith. Uprooting her ultimately from her own self. A coming-of-age novel, a memoir of a Catholic childhood, a piercing and witty look at social pretensions, a story of lost possibilities and girlhood betrayals: perhaps only a novelist of Hilary Mantel’s enormous talents could have taken such material and shaped it into so fresh and arresting a tale.
... Read moreBring Up the Bodies
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Ben Miles
- Length: 16 hours 22 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: June 16, 2020
- Language: English
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4.27(69754 ratings)
This program is read by Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
WINNER OF THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
The sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Bring Up the Bodies delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn.
Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.
At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne’s head?
Bring Up the Bodies is one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2012, one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Best Books of 2012 and one of The Washington Post’s 10 Best Books of 2012
... Read moreBring Up the Bodies
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Simon Vance
- Length: 14 hours 34 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: May 08, 2012
- Language: English
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4.27(69755 ratings)
The sequel to Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn
Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.
At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne’s head?
Bring Up the Bodies is the winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize
Bring Up the Bodies is one of Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Best Books of 2012 and one of The Washington Post‘s 10 Best Books of 2012
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Hilary Mantel
- Length: 10 hours 40 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: May 30, 2014
- Language: English
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3.65(1763 ratings)
When Frances Shore joins her engineer husband in Jeddah she is warned not to ask questions. But bored, she begins to speculate about her neighbours and the empty flat above her. At first she believes the flat is being used as a lover’s tryst – then she suspects something more sinister.
... Read moreEvery Day Is Mother’s Day
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Hilary Mantel
- Length: 8 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: November 08, 2013
- Language: English
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3.56(1008 ratings)
Evelyn Axon is a medium by trade; her daughter, Muriel, is a half-wit by nature. Barricaded in their crumbling house, surrounded by the festering rubbish of years, they defy the curiosity of their neighbors and their social worker, Isabel Field. Isabel is young and inexperienced and has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders the streets, and a lover, Colin, who wants her to run away with him. But Colin has three horrible children and a shrill wife who is pregnant again–how is he going to run anywhere? As Isabel wrestles with her own problems, a horrible secret grows in the darkness of the Axon household. When at last it comes to light, the result is by turns hilarious and terrifying.
... Read moreFludd
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Hilary Mantel
- Length: 6 hours 41 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: June 21, 2013
- Language: English
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3.55(3949 ratings)
One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin-or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. No matter how copiously Father Angwin drinks while he confesses his broken faith, the level of the bottle does not drop. Although Fludd does not appear to be eating, the food on his plate disappears. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action. Knitting together the miraculous and the mundane, the dreadful and the ludicrous, Fludd is a tale of alchemy and transformation told with astonishing art, insight, humor, and wit.
... Read moreLearning to Talk
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 3 hours 37 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: June 21, 2022
- Language: English
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3.71(554 ratings)
“The multiple performances in this audiobook are uniformly adept, providing listeners the disarming experience of adults unflinchingly looking back at childhood.” -AudioFile on Learning to Talk
Learning to Talk is a dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy.
With a new foreword by Hilary Mantel.
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 “King Billy Is A Gentleman,” the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. “Curved Is the Line of Beauty“ is a story of friendship, faith, and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. 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, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.
With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed.
“A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat…Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.” —USA Today
“Her short stories always recognize other potential realities…Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.” —The Washington Post
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.
Terminus: A “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” Essay
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Jane Carr
- Length: 11 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: December 08, 2015
- Language: English
Terminus: A “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” Essay by Hilary Mantel
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is The New York Times bestselling collection, from the Man Booker prize-winner for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, that has been called “scintillating” (New York Times Books Review), “breathtaking” (NPR), “exquisite” (The Chicago Tribune) and “otherworldly” (Washington Post).
... Read moreThe Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Jane Carr
- Length: 4 hours 29 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: September 30, 2014
- Language: English
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3.43(7145 ratings)
One of the most accomplished, acclaimed, and garlanded writers, Hilary Mantel delivers a brilliant collection of contemporary stories
In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel’s trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display.
Stories of dislocation and family fracture, of whimsical infidelities and sudden deaths with sinister causes, brilliantly unsettle the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way.
Cutting to the core of human experience, Mantel brutally and acutely writes about marriage, class, family, and sex. Unpredictable, diverse, and sometimes shocking, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers.
... Read moreThe Giant, O’Brien
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Hilary Mantel
- Length: 6 hours 21 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: April 18, 2014
- Language: English
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3.42(1212 ratings)
London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. In the midst of it all is the Giant, O’Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in myths, fairies, miracles, and little people. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. O’Brien’s opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter, who lusts after the Giant’s corpse as a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge. In her acclaimed novel, two-time Man Booker Prize winning author Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of Ireland and England. As belief wrestles knowledge and science wrestles song, so The Giant, O’Brien calls to us from a fork in the road as a tale of time, and a timeless tale.
... Read moreThe Mirror & the Light
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Ben Miles
- Length: 38 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: March 10, 2020
- Language: English
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4.39(5287 ratings)
“The many listeners enthralled by the earlier two volumes in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy will find all their expectations met in this final installment… Here is a narrative achievement of the highest order.” — AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner
This program is read by Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
*This program includes a bonus conversation between Ben Miles and Hilary Mantel*
“If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?“
With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with her peerless, Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.
The story begins in 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, Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour.
Cromwell, a man with only his wits to rely on, 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 the breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. All of England lies at his feet, ripe for innovation and religious reform. But as fortune’s wheel turns, Cromwell’s enemies are gathering in the shadows. The inevitable question remains: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s cruel and capricious gaze?
Eagerly awaited and eight years in the making, The Mirror & the Light completes Cromwell’s journey from self-made man to one of the most feared, influential figures of his time. Portrayed by Mantel with pathos and terrific energy, Cromwell is as complex as he is unforgettable: a politician and a fixer, a husband and a father, a man who both defied and defined his age.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company
“Miles’ familiarity with Mantel’s portrayal of Cromwell pervades his performance of The Mirror & the Light, which traces Cromwell’s fall from greatness, beginning with the aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s beheading and ending with his own.Miles’ voice carries the power-hungry statesman’s monumental final act with ease and a delicate nuance, as only someone with a deep understanding of the story could.” – BookPage
“Ben Miles — Group Captain Peter Townsend in “The Crown” — has, in addition to narrating this final volume, taken on the massive task of delivering “Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies,” as well. He also played Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of “Wolf Hall Parts One & Two,” and captures again the man’s voice, its taint of baseness, its ups and downs and quiet ruthlessness.” — Washington Post
... Read moreVacant Possession
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Hilary Mantel
- Length: 9 hours 24 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: April 25, 2014
- Language: English
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3.51(689 ratings)
Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon was locked away for society’s protection, but psychiatric confinement has only increased her malice and ingenuity. At last free, she sets into motion an intricate plan to exact revenge on those who had her put away. Her former social worker, Isabel, and her old neighbors have moved on, but Muriel, with her talent for disguise, will infiltrate their homes and manipulate their lives, until all her enemies are brought together for a gruesome finale. Hilary Mantel’s razor-sharp wit animates every page of this darkly comic tale of retribution.
... Read moreWolf Hall
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Ben Miles
- Length: 25 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: June 16, 2020
- Language: English
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3.9(147262 ratings)
This program is read by Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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 twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is “a darkly brilliant reimagining of life under Henry VIII…Magnificent.” (The Boston Globe).
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company
Wolf Hall
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrator: Simon Slater
- Length: 23 hours 1 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: November 01, 2009
- Language: English
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3.9(147262 ratings)
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power
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 twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
... Read more