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Top of the pile
81
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
88/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Hilary Mantel
Publisher:
Henry Holt and Co.
Date:
October 24, 2023
"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. ... [This memoir] collects the finest of this writing over four decades. ... 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 ... about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia"--
What The Reviewers Say
Mantel...left behind a literary legacy that also includes a wide range of her right-handed writing. A Memoir of My Former Self gathers together the best of it. Spanning four decades, and comprising work that originally appeared in various outlets, this bravura collection of articles, essays, reviews and talks showcases the inquiring mind, fierce intelligence and shrewd way with words of a dexterous — and indeed, ambidextrous — prose stylist.
A continuous delight.
There are essays on politics, America, cricket and Biggles, a superb one on procrastination and several I could have coped without.
We must be grateful that she has left us this collection of pieces, thoughtfully compiled by Pearson into five thematic sections corresponding to different aspects of Mantel’s writing life, and illustrated with personal photographs.
