An edition of Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

Giving up the ghost

a memoir

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Last edited by ImportBot
October 18, 2022 | History
An edition of Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

Giving up the ghost

a memoir

  • 5.00 ·
  • 1 Rating
  • 14 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 2 Have read

At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o'clock and she is getting the cabbage on. 'Hello, Our Ilary,' she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn't stretch to the 'H'.Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's wry, shocking and uniquely unusual five-part autobiography of childhood, ghosts, illness and family.It opens in 1995 with 'A Second Home', in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, a death which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of childhood. 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' begins in typical, gripping Mantel fashion: 'Two of my relatives have died by fire.' Set during the 1950s, it takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating with the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelit ceremony of her mother's 'churching'. In 'The Secret Garden' Mantel moves to a haunted house and mysteriously gains a stepfather. When she is almost eleven, her family flee the gossips and the ghosts, and resolve to start a new life. 'Smile' is an account of teenage perplexity, in a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Convent school provides a certain sanctuary, with tacit assistance from the fearsome 'Top Nun.' In the final section, the author tells how, through medical misunderstandings and neglect, she came to be childless, and how the ghosts of the unborn, like chances missed or pages unturned, have come to haunt her life as a writer.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
261

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Previews available in: English Undetermined

Edition Availability
Cover of: Giving up the ghost
Giving up the ghost: a memoir
2005, BBC Audiobooks/Chivers, Thorndike Press
in English
Cover of: Giving up the ghost
Giving up the ghost: a memoir
2003, Henry Holt
in English - 1st American ed.
Cover of: GIVING UP THE GHOST: A MEMOIR.
GIVING UP THE GHOST: A MEMOIR.
2003, FOURTH ESTATE
in Undetermined

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Published in
Bath, England, Waterville, Me
Genre
Biography.

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
823/.914
Library of Congress
PR6063.A438 Z467 2005

The Physical Object

Pagination
261 p. (large print) ;
Number of pages
261

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL3311193M
ISBN 10
0786272171, 1405632429, 1405632437
LCCN
2004062079
Library Thing
144965
Goodreads
3594425
3594427
3594424

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
October 18, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
October 17, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
December 8, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
March 25, 2019 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
April 1, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from Scriblio MARC record