Learning to Talk
Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall trilogy.
In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, Learning to Talk is a collection of loosely autobiographical stories that locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.
Absorbing and evocative, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the young 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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two-time Booker winner Mantel (Wolf Hall) departs from the broad canvas of Tudor history for a revelatory collection drawing on her childhood in a northern English moorland village. Several center on fraught relationships with parents and stepparents. "You should not judge your parents," says the narrator, twice, in "Giving up the Ghost." Mantel quotes Thucydides one moment, Shakespeare the next, or St. Augustine, and high and low fit together comfortably in "Curved Is the Line of Beauty," in which the narrator remembers seeing the Arthur O'Shaughnessy poem referenced in the title on a jar as a child, which brings solace during a tough time ruled by Catholic guilt and limited means ("we continued to live in one of those houses where there was never any money, and doors were slammed hard"). In "The Clean Slate," which begins with the narrator working on her family tree with her mother, the narrator reflects memorably on history: "I distrust anecdote. I like to understand history through figures and percentages of these figures, through knowing the price of coal and the price of corn.... I like to be free, so far as I can, from the tyranny of interpretation." Throughout, the author's humanity shines through.
