An Experiment in Love
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- 59,00 kr
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- 59,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
Following ‘A Change in Climate’, this brilliant novel from the double Man Booker prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’ is a coming-of-age tale set in Seventies London.
It is London, 1970. Carmel McBain, in her first term at university, has cut free of her childhood roots in the north. Among the gossiping, flirtatious girls of Tonbridge Hall, she begins her experiments in life and love. But the year turns. The mini-skirt falls out of style and an era of concealment begins. Carmel’s world darkens, and tragedy waits in the wings.
Reviews
‘The most powerful of her novels, a near-faultless masterpiece of pathos, observation and feeling … She writes like an angel.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Hilary Mantel is a wonderfully unsurprised dissector of human motivation, and in An Experiment in Love she has written a bleak tale seamed with crackling wit.’ Helen Dunmore, Observer
‘Funny, tragic and wondefully perceptive, this is a book to be treasured, for the sheer quality of its writing and for its honesty.’ Independent
‘A near-faultless masterpiece of pathos, observation and feeling … She writes like an angel.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Mantel writes prose of imperturbable aplomp, crisp with irony and highlighted with deftly places, elegantly surprising images … she has a penchant for caustic, spiky heroines and a sardonic ear for dialogue.’ Sunday Times
‘My favourite novel of the year: An Experiment in Love is written with subtle perceptiveness, sharp wit and canny wisdom’ Margaret Forster, Independent
‘Cool unsentimental, and unassumingly authoritative.’ Anita Brookner, Spectator
‘The time is 1970, and it is wonderfully well evoked … The skill with which Mantel manages her time-shifts, the precision of her writing, the acuteness of her observations, the seriousness of her themes, and the way in which she weaves them into a coherant whole, make this an unusually satisfying novel.’ Allan Massie, Scotsman
‘An Experiment in Love has much to say about its turbulant era, and is replete with the atmosphere of the cusp, with the prospect of irreversible change … It is also a profoundly sad novel, to which Mantel’s liberal sense of comedy and dazzling acuity for metaphor add an almost excruciating flavour.’ Rachel Cusk, The Times
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
Carmel McBain is a bright Lancashire-Irish child whose mother is fond of telling her, "your father's not just a clerk, you know"-though, in fact, he is. As Carmel grows up, this snobbish tendency metamorphoses into the brutal driving force of the girl's young life. As a teenager, with ambition bullied into her, she alternates between nights spent locked in her room to study and days filled with the "routine sarcasms of nuns." Carmel's move from posh convent to London university is a lonely one; at school, she undergoes a disturbing loss of self-awareness. Between her mother's ruthlessness and the cruelties of the nuns, Carmel's self-worth has been damaged, with near fatal results. Mantel's seventh novel (but only her second to appear here, after A Place of Greater Safety, 1993) is a powerful coming-of-age story that meticulously highlights the patterns of self-inflicted cruelty sometimes taught to young women. It perfectly conveys the confusion of one contemporary Catholic girl, and provides a subtly moving take on the mystery of anorexia nervosa. Despite its grim subject, the writing, replete with sharp humor and evocative details of 1960s England, is never self-indulgent. Irony prevails stoutly over sentimentality, while the finale delivers a surprising twist of horror that will shake readers to the core.
