On September 22nd, 2022, award-winning author Hilary Mantel passed away suddenly at the age of 70.
Fans and fellow writers alike have shared their favorite books by Mantel, including her Wolf Hall trilogy, as well as her other achievements.
Mantel’s publisher, 4th Estate Books, owned by HarperCollins, stated, “Hilary Mantel will always be remembered as a truly original writer. She leaves behind a remarkable body of work which inspire readers around the world.”
Author Joyce Carol Oates agreed and hailed Mantel as “a writer of subtlety and depth,” while J.K. Rowling succinctly stated, “We have lost a genius.”
Hilary Mantel was previously appointed a Dame in 2014 for her literary achievements and contributions.
Mantel remains well-known for her uniquely intense fiction, which was interwoven with intimate details from her life. Hilary Mantel once said of this stranger-than-fiction phenomenon, “Some of these things are true and some of them are lies. But they are all good stories.”
To celebrate her memory, here are 5 of our favorite books by Dame Hilary Mantel:
The Wolf Hall Trilogy: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & The Light (2009, 2012, 2020, 4th Estate)
For many readers, this trilogy is the one that put Hilary Mantel on the literary map. For Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, she won the Booker Prize, which was unprecedented on two counts. This was the first instance of two books receiving the Booker Prize from the same trilogy, and Mantel was the first woman to be awarded with it twice.
While The Mirror & The Light did not win the Booker Prize, it was a finalist for the award, and it also won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2021, which Wolf Hall also won in its respective year.
Giving Up the Ghost (2003, 4th Estate)
In her first full-length memoir, readers were enchanted to learn of the stories behind Mantel’s preoccupation with ghosts, as well as how her unique world views came to be.
But readers were far more perplexed by the darker corners of Mantel’s childhood, as well as her struggles with years of undiagnosed endometriosis and other autoimmune issues. One such ghost of her past that Mantel openly wrote about was the daughter she would never have, and who would never live to meet her, because of her lack of a formal diagnosis. “If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to the self,” became one of Mantel’s most memorable lines for her memoir fans.
Learning to Talk: Stories (2022, Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.)
After the success of her Wolf Hall trilogy, readers were expecting great things from Mantel — and her follow-up collection of short stories with unwavering autobiographical elements did not disappoint.
Continuing with the haunted childhood she first depicted in Giving Up the Ghost, Mantel shared more troubling, isolated moments from her childhood, which would illuminate more about the characters and stories she developed in the earlier years of her writing career.
Beyond Black (2005, 4th Estate)
Following the story of Alison, a traveling psychic and empath who is haunted by a circus dwarf while attempting to help heal and cleanse grieving estates throughout middle England, readers were left as haunted by this book as Alison herself.
While clearly fiction and darkly whimsical, readers were swept up in this story and the world Mantel that clearly went beyond the black — beyond what we know and beyond the safety of our homes. Lurking with ghosts, secrets and regret, this book packs an emotional punch that would not let go of readers easily.
According to The Guardian, “Hilary Mantel has taken the ethereal halfway house between the living and the dead and nailed it on the page.”
Mantel Pieces (2020, 4th Estate)
Like the essays in Learning to Talk, readers were pleased by Mantel’s breezy autobiographical tone, while also being taken aback by the many influences they noticed in her autobiographical works that made an appearance in some matter in her fiction.
Mantel did not shy away from the blending of autobiography with fiction, as long as it told a meaningful truth and was a good story — and perhaps nowhere is that better depicted than in this collection.
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