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Giving Up the Ghost
First published 2003
About the book
At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o’clock and she is getting the cabbage on. ‘Hello, Our Ilary,’ she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn’t stretch to the ’H’.Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel’s wry, shocking and uniquely unusual five-part autobiography of childhood, ghosts, illness and family.
Read the full description
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 mother’s ‘churching’. In ‘The Secret Garden’ Mantel moves to a haunted house and mysteriously gains a stepfather.
About the author
All 6 books by Hilary MantelSubjects
Catalogue record
- Author
- Mantel, Hilary, 1952–2022
- Statement
- Giving Up the Ghost / Hilary Mantel.
Book facts
- Pages
- 240
- ISBN
- 978-1-4074-9934-5
4 more ISBNs
- 978-0-7862-7217-4
- 978-1-4299-0065-2
- 978-0-00-714841-7
- 978-1-4056-3242-3
- Records
- Open Library Wikidata
