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Details
Learning to Talk: Stories
Author: Hilary Mantel
Narrator: Anna Bentinck, Jane Collingwood, Patrick Moy
Unabridged: 3 hr 37 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: 06/21/2022
Synopsis
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
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 & Company.
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About the Author
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.