Vacant Possession Synopsis
From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light a savagely funny tale that revisits the characters from the much-loved Every Day is Mother's Day. Muriel Axon is about to re-enter the lives of Colin Sidney, hapless husband, father and schoolmaster, and Isabel Field, failed social worker and practising neurotic.
It is ten years since her last tangle with them, but for Muriel this is not time enough. There are still scores to be settled, truths to be faced and rather a lot of vengeance to be wreaked.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781841153407 |
| Publication date: |
16th January 2006 |
| Author: |
Hilary Mantel |
| Publisher: |
HarperPerennial an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
256 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
|
Hilary Mantel Press Reviews
'Savage and funny black humour at its best' Time Out
'The macabre and wonderfully funny plot has as many twists and turns as a well-made thriller' Standard
'Filled with fiendish glee......Lie back and laugh yourself silly: this is the best send-up for a long, long time.' New Statesman
'Hilary Mantel's wit is wonderful and startlingly nasty' Sunday Times
'The farce is edged with constant acuteness about our current social mess and the pleas for charity to begin at home never miss the bull' Observer
About Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel is the first woman and the first British author to win the Man Booker prize twice and the first author ever to win the Man Booker Prize and Costa Book Award in the same year. At 60, she is only the third double winner alongside J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. She is also the first person to win the prize for two novels in a trilogy, following her success in 2009 with Wolf Hall.
Hilary Mantel was born in northern Derbyshire in 1952. She was educated at a convent school in Cheshire and went on to the LSE and Sheffield University, where she studied law. After university she was briefly a social worker in a geriatric hospital, and much later used her experiences in her novels Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. In 1977 she went to live in Botswana with her husband, then a geologist. In 1982 they moved on to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where she would set her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.
Her first novel was published in 1985, and she returned to the UK the following year. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing, and became the film critic of the Spectator. Her fourth novel, Fludd, was awarded the Cheltenham Festival Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Prize. Her fifth novel, A Place of Greater Safety, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
A Change of Climate, published in 1993, is the story of an East Anglian family, former missionaries, torn apart by conflicts generated in Southern Africa in the early years of Apartheid. An Experiment in Love published in 1995, is a story about childhood and university life, set in London in 1970. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.
Photograph © Jane Bown
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