Learning to Talk Short Stories

'Mercilessly funny' Daily Telegraph

'Mantel writes with wit, compassion and great elegance.' Independent on Sunday

On 'Giving Up the Ghost':

'Like Lorna Sage's BAD BLOOD, GIVING UP THE GHOST is a story of childhood that is also a piece of history. Hilary Mantel's self-portrait is a masterpiece of wit, but it conjures up a time and a place and an epoch of female experience with razor-edged sobriety. That past, so thoroughly vanished, is made to live again here - disclosed, cannily and heartbreakingly, as once it too yielded up its author's mind.' Rachel Cusk

'What a remarkable writer she is. She is piercingly, even laceratingly observant, and every remembered detail has the sharpness of a good photograph. And yet for all its brilliance of detail and its black comedy the memoir is heavy with atmosphere. It's a very startling and daring memoir; the more I read it the more unsettling it becomes.' Helen Dunmore

'I was riveted. It's raw, it's distressing and it's full of piercing insights into a novelist's mind.' Margaret Forster