A Change of Climate
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the double Man Booker prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’, and ’Bring Up the Bodies’ this is an epic yet subtle family saga about broken trusts and buried secrets.
Ralph and Anna Eldred live in the big Red House in Norfolk, raising their four children and devoting their lives to charity. The constant flood of ‘good souls and sad cases’, children plucked from the squalor of the East London streets for a breath of fresh countryside air, hides the growing crises in their own family, the disillusionment of their children, the fissures in their marriage. Memories of their time as missionaries in South Africa and Botswana, of the terrible African tragedies that have shaped the rest of their lives, refuse to be put to rest and threaten to destroy the fragile peace they have built for themselves and their children.
This is a breathtakingly intelligent novel that asks the most difficult questions. Is there anything one can never forgive? Is tragedy ever deserved? Can you ever escape your own past? A literary family saga written with the skill and subtlety of a true master, this is Hilary Mantel at her best.
Reviews
‘A beautifully crafted novel’ Guardian
‘There are very few novels that not only bristle with ideas but leave you asking questions about those ideas, again and again, your world turned upside down. Mantel has managed to do this.’ Sunday Times
‘The best book she’s written … She writes about punishing subjects so freshly it is as if they had never been written about before.’ Observer
‘It has the tension of a first-rate thriller and the breadth of a family saga … Its compassion and its intellectual energy mark her as the novelist of her generation who will achieve a lasting greatness.’ Literary Review
‘A complex and highly intelligent portrayal of injustice, bereavement and the loss of faith … Hilary Mantel has created that rare thing, a page-turner with a profound moral dimension.’ Daily Telegraph
‘A work of exquisite craftsmanship that asks enormous questions.’ Independent
About the author
Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
High art meets soap opera in this beautifully written but high-strung sixth novel from Britain's Hawthornden-winner Mantel. Ralph and Anna Eldred are newlyweds in the mid-1960s, when Ralph is offered a position as a missionary in South Africa. In the town of Elim, the two provide day care and food and soon begin to identify with their black neighbors. Naturally, the government is displeased, and they are eventually jailed, then moved to another mission in Bechuanaland (present-day Botswana), where hostile natives commit a terrible crime against them. This crime casts a long shadow over the novel's main action, in which the Eldreds must face new threats to their faith in God and in each other. Thirty years later, the couple is still performing good works, with Ralph running a charitable trust in London and the family taking in various lost souls at its Norfolk farmhouse. Beneath the precocious banter of their children (who learn early to divide these visitors into two categories: Sad Cases and Good Souls), the secret of Ralph's and Anna's ordeal in Africa remains a source of anguish and fearful curiosity and drives the generations apart even as it binds them, helplessly and mysteriously, together. Eventually, one son takes up with a woman who lives in quasi-isolation with her mother, selling crafts and produce from a roadside stand, and Ralph begins an affair with the girlfriend's mother. With subtle foreshadowings, suspense to spare and just a few blatant authorial nudges, these family matters come to a head. This gripping work is sure to raise Mantel's star with American readers. FYI: Mantel is only the second woman to win Britain's prestigious Hawthornden Prize since its inception in 1919. Owl is publishing this paperback first American edition in conjunction with her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, also new to American readers.
