Tag Archives: Hilary Mantel
Robert Bound, John Mitchinson and Ted Hodgkinson review the final – and rather hefty – instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy.
Inteviews: 67-Year Old British Author Hilary Mantel – “Extraordinarily Probable Fiction” (NYT)
Excerpts from a New York Times interview (Feb 24, 2020):
“Hilary has reset the historical patterns through the way in which she’s reimagined the man,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford theology professor who published a new Cromwell biography in 2018. “It’s fiction which is extraordinarily probable, and it’s remarkably like the Cromwell I’d been excavating myself.”
Hilary Mantel has a recurring anxiety dream that takes place in a library. She finds a book with some scrap of historical information she’s been seeking, but when she tries to read it, the words disintegrate before her eyes.
“And then when you wake up,” she said, “you’ve got the rhythm of a sentence in your head, but you don’t know what the sentence was.”
To an unusual degree for a novelist, Mantel feels bound by facts. That approach has made her latest project — a nearly 1,800-page trilogy about the 16th-century lawyer and fixer Thomas Cromwell — more complicated than anything she’s undertaken in her four decades of writing.
New Historical Fiction: “To Calais, In Ordinary Time” By James Meek Is “Inventive And Original”
From a Canongate.co.uk online release:
“Fans of intelligent historical fiction will be enthralled by a story so original and so fully imagined. Meek shows the era as alien, which it is, and doesn’t falsify it by assimilating it to ours. But his characters are recognisably warm and human”
HILARY MANTEL
“An inventive and original novel that captures the distant past and pins it to the page”
The Times, Book Of The Month
Three journeys. One road.
England, 1348. A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a Scots proctor sets out for Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais.
Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers’ past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires.
https://canongate.co.uk/books/2764-to-calais-in-ordinary-time/
Boomers Daily 