A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel
A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel
List: $34.99 | Sale: $24.50
Club: $17.49

A Place of Greater Safety

Author: Hilary Mantel

Narrator: Jonathan Keeble

Unabridged: 33 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 06/28/2013


Synopsis

It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden--and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. In the swells of revolution, they each taste the addictive delights of power, and the price that must be paid for it.

About Hilary Mantel

English author, Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, was born in Glossop, Derbyshire in 1952. She attended St. Charles Roman Catholic primary school in the mill village of Hadfield. Her parents were actually Irish descent, but were born in England. Mantel's father divorced her mother and left when she was eleven years old. She never saw him again. Her mother did not marry, but spent her life with Jack Mantel, from whom Hilary took his name as her surname. Her schooling ended with a bachelor's degree in Jurisprudence in 1973. She then worked in social work in a geriatric hospital.

Her books include historical fiction, including a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell's rise to power under King Henry VIII. They were Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light (which was just released in the UK in March of 2020). She twice won the Booker Award.

In keeping with her unconventional life, Hilary married Gerald McEwen, a geologist in 1972, and they lived in exotic places such as Botswana and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. They were divorced after he gave up geology to be her business manager, but then remarried.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on November 23, 2012

Finally decided to jack this one and I'm light-headed and blinking like a person unaccustomed to the light and the sweet air of liberty. What a bummer when you pick a big long novel and it turns out to be the pain in the arse this one did - not so bad that I could apply the 100 page rule but not so......more

Goodreads review by Jane on September 25, 2012

Where I got the book: my local library. Spoilers but only if you never knew the French Revolution = wholesale death and that real characters who lived 200+ years ago may be a little on the deceased side by now anyway. "Louise Robert says she would write a novel...but she fears that as a character in......more

Goodreads review by Sue on May 19, 2014

Well, thanks to the ministrations of Hilary Mantel, I now feel that I have the start of an understanding of the French Revolution and some of its key players. While A Place of Greater Safety is an acknowledged historical fiction, it is peopled with historical figures who lived the revolution, wrote......more