Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir

Mantel's memoir looks back at her life, from a Catholic working-class childhood in northern England to adult years marked by serious illness. She writes about her family, her sense of being haunted by what is lost, and the long struggle to be believed about her health. Its tone is direct, sharp and often funny, and it shows how memory, the body and the imagination shape one another. It is also a guide to how a writer grows from experience. Readers of her fiction will find roots of many of her later themes here.