Pre-order your signed first edition of Mantel Pieces now! Mantel Pieces will be published on 1 October 2020; orders will be dispatched on that date.

MANTEL PIECES is a collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir spanning over three decades.

Hilary Mantel’s subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, and a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britain’s last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her famous lecture, ‘Royal Bodies’ explores the place of royal women in society and our imagination. Here too are some of Mantel’s LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and a confrontation with a circus strongman.

Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.