Giving Up The Ghost : A Memoir (john Macrae Books) [Paperback]

New York Timesbestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the worlds most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers.Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied.

Selected by theNew York Timesas one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me.

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children.

Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to write herself into beingone novel after another. This wry and visceral memoir will certainly bring new converts to Mantels dark genius.

Mesmerizing.The New York Times

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of many novels includingWolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She is also the author ofA Change of Climate,A Place of Greater Safety,Eight Months on Ghazzah Street,An Experiment in Love,The Giant, O'Brien,Fludd,Beyond Black,Every Day Is Mother's Day, andVacant Possession. She has also written a memoir,Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared inThe New York Times,The New York Review of Books, and theLondon Review of Books. She lives in England with her husband.