Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir by Hilary Mantel
ISBN: 9780007142729
Fourth Estate, March 2010
272 pages, Paperback
Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall. a wry. shocking and beautiful memoir of childhood. ghosts. hauntings. illness and family . Giving up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantels uniquely unusual five-part autobiography.Opening in 1995 with A Second Home. Mantel describes the death of her stepfather which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of her childhood. In Now Geoffrey Dont Torment Her Mantel takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood. culminating in the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelight ceremony of her mothers churching. In Smile. an account of teenage perplexity. Mantel describes a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life.