A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel - digital resources

The magnificent final book from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. ‘Ink is a generative fluid,’ she explains. ‘If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.’ A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

Praise for Hilary Mantel:

‘A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature’ Margaret Atwood

‘One of the very greatest of our writers; poetic and profound prose with an incomparable feel for the texture of history’ Simon Schama

‘Mantel bristled with intelligence, looked at everything, saw everything… With the uneasy energy of her early life, Mantel made rigorous and unsettling work about history, the body and the unknowable’ Anne Enright