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Hilary Mantel's Reading List

The author of “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” prefers books with action: “I don’t like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities.”

By the Book: Hilary Mantel (2013)

NYT By the Book column (2013-05-16).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Life After Life

Kate Atkinson · Buy on Amazon

"“Best” as simply enjoyable would be Kate Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life,” ingenious and furiously energetic: it’s exhilarating to see a novelist at the top of her game."

Religion and the Decline of Magic

Keith Thomas · Buy on Amazon

"It’s a monumental book, yet with a living treasure on every page, and probably the book that, in my whole life, I’ve pressed on other people most energetically."

Fingersmith

Sarah Waters · 2002 · Buy on Amazon

"picking up some vast immersive novel, like Sarah Waters’s “Fingersmith”: a book which, when it was new, I read as if I were a child, utterly thrilled and beguiled by it."

Bad Blood

Lorna Sage · Buy on Amazon

"It’s not recent, but I would recommend “Bad Blood,” by Lorna Sage. It’s a memoir of childhood and private life that has an almost eerie immediacy."

Complete Works of Shakespeare

William Shakespeare · Buy on Amazon

"no book has mattered to me as much as the dirt-cheap Complete Works of Shakespeare I laid my hands on when I was 10."

Kidnapped

Robert Louis Stevenson · Buy on Amazon

"Once I’d banished King Arthur, and I was 9 or 10, the characters I lived through were the two leading men in “Kidnapped,” the strait-laced young David Balfour and the weathered desperado Alan Breck."

Favorite books (2023)

Favorite books recommended by Hilary Mantel, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/hilary-mantel-favorite-books/.

Source: radicalreads.com

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