The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories
Hilary Mantel
Language: English
Pages: 242
ISBN: 1627792104
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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).
"A new Hilary Mantel book is an Event with a 'capital 'E.'"-NPR
"A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat."-USA Today (4 stars)
"[Mantel is at] the top of her game."-Salon
"Genius."-The Seattle Times
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.
aim was good, almost good. We heard the pebble ping from the frame of the chair, and at once a low cry, not like a human voice, like something else. “I bloody got it,” Mary said. For a moment she stood tall and glowing. Then she ducked, she plummeted, rustling, beside me. The evening shapes of the terrace, serene, then fractured and split. With a rapid step the lady came, snapping through the tall arched shadows thrown back by the garden against the house, the shadow of gates and trellises, the
forget now why we call him Shinbone. Usually we name them by their specialities, and he’s not in orthopedics. It must be because of the way his patients look—thinner and thinner, sharpening and sharpening. We see them come in the first time, bluff and flushed, walking bolsters in tweed and cashmere: then we see them get too weak to make it upstairs. By contrast there’s Gland, the top-floor endocrinologist. Gland is a woman who wheezes as she walks. “Make me normal,” her patients plead: as if she
brown stewing, and her curly hair hung above her ears in woolly clumps. She whispered to me, “Sometimes he’s on call, you know, the rota. He’s out till all hours. Did he do that before?” My father, always a diffident man, was agitating his knees beneath his babes, by way of bouncing them. He was singing to them, in a subfusc way: “One-a-penny two-a-penny, hot cross buns.” Love is not free. In point of fact, he was reduced to penury, but he must have counted on that. I expect Simon Kaplan admired
into the layers of her clothes, and layers in fact were monitored. There was a camera in every bathroom, or so Morna said. They would see her if she made herself sick. Then they would put her to bed. She lay so many days in bed that when she came home her legs were wasted and white. The founder of the unit, a Scottish doctor with a burning ideal, had given the girls garden plots and required them to grow their own vegetables. Once she had seen a starving girl eat some young peas, pod and all.
craned my neck I could see a new police presence to my left, trotting up from the private gardens of Clarence Crescent. “Have one of these?” The visitor had found his cigarettes. “No. And I’d rather you didn’t.” “Fair enough.” He crushed the pack into his pocket, and pulled out a balled-up handkerchief. He stood back from the tall window, mopping his face; face and handkerchief were both crumpled and gray. Clearly it wasn’t something he was used to, tricking himself into private houses. I was