Learning to Talk, Hilary Mantel
Learning to Talk, Hilary Mantel
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Learning to Talk
Stories

Author: Hilary Mantel

Narrator: Anna Bentinck, Jane Collingwood, Patrick Moy

Unabridged: 3 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/21/2022

Synopsis

"The multiple performances in this audiobook are uniformly adept, providing listeners the disarming experience of adults unflinchingly looking back at childhood." -AudioFile on Learning to Talk

Learning to Talk is a dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy.

With a new foreword by Hilary Mantel.

In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.

Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In “King Billy Is A Gentleman,” the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. “Curved Is the Line of Beauty" is a story of friendship, faith, and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In “Third Floor Rising," she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.

With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed.

“A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.” —USA Today

“Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.” —The Washington Post

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.

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 Candi

3.5 stars I enjoy reading a collection of short stories while I have another book going. I’ll read a story every other night or so before closing my eyes. If it’s a new-to-me-author, I also get a sense of whether I’d like to read one of his or her novels in the future. That was the case here. I know......more

Goodreads review by Kevin Lopez (on sabbatical)

“My territory was shrinking … All I owned was the space behind my ribs. And that, too, was a scarred battleground; the site of sudden debouchments and winter campaigns...” Potent in its vulnerability, enduring in its ephemerality, made weighty and immutable by the very dint of its fleeting and fugiti......more

Quotes

Praise for Learning to Talk

“Part of her consistent brilliance lies in her attention to ghosts and mortgages, the light on the moors and 1980s educational policy, adolescent self-discovery and irregular accounting. These stories hold worlds as wide as those of her longest novels.”
—Sarah Moss, The New York Times Book Review

“Those who’ve delighted for decades in Mantel’s fiction revel in her chameleonlike facility with language, her ability effortlessly to evoke wildly diverse characters, settings, and atmospheres . . . . The stories here enable us the more fully to appreciate Mantel’s wide-ranging gifts . . . . The overall effect of the collection is of a palimpsest, the powerfully atmospheric evocation of an unhappy mid-twentieth-century childhood in northern England.”
—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

“It’s a testament to Mantel’s brilliance as an author that even though the moments in these stories are subtle, the book somehow feels epic in its own way…And the result is magnificent. Learning to Talk is a lovely book, quiet but intense in its own way, and it proves—once again—that Mantel is one of the finest English-language authors working today.”
—NPR

“Mantel brings England alive, writing with detail and intellect.”
—Time

“Elegant, pitch-perfect sentences…Here is a writer who can do anything, anytime, anywhere.”
—Oprah Daily

“Although best known for her long novels, Mantel has also excelled at short, intensely atmospheric books…and here that economy shines, as when she homes in on the telling detail with surgical precision…Mantel was born a poor Northern girl, but she was raised to be a writer who would destroy kingdoms.”
—The Boston Globe

“Wish Mantel’s Wolf Hall (award-winning, bestselling trilogy) had never come to an end? You’ll enjoy her new collection of short stories.”
—CNN

“Puts all of the author’s skill and style on display…”
—Town & Country


Praise for Books by Hilary Mantel

“She is our literary Michelangelo.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Every page is rich with insight...soul-deep characterization and cutting observational skill.”
—USA Today

“Deep, suspenseful, chewy, complex and utterly transporting—truly a full banquet.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, Wall Street Journal Magazine

“Sumptuous prose.”
—The New Yorker

“A treasure on every page.”
—The Times (UK)

“Majestic and often breathtakingly poetic…the writing comes as close to poetry as prose ever may.”
—Simon Schama, Financial Times

Awards

  • Time Magazine Best Books of the Year
  • Library Journal Best Books of the Year
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