About
The Giant, O'Brien Synopsis
From the author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light, comes the true story of the 18th Century Irish giant, Charles O'Brien, who was exhibited in London and eventually dissected by the surgeon John Hunter. Charles O'Brien, bard and giant.
The cynical are moved by his flights of romance; the craven stirred by his tales of epic deeds. But what of his own story as he is led from Ireland to seek his fortune beyond the seas in England? The Surprising Irish Giant may be the sensation of the season but only his compatriots seem to attend to his mythic powers of invention. John Hunter, celebrated surgeon and anatomist, buys dead men from the gallows and babies' corpses by the inch. Where is a man as unique as The Giant to hide his bones when he is yet alive?
The Giant, O' Brien is an unforgettable novel; lyrical, shocking and spliced with black comedy.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781857028867 |
| Publication date: |
3rd June 1999 |
| Author: |
Hilary Mantel |
| Publisher: |
4th Estate an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
224 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
|
| Other Genres: |
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Press Reviews
Hilary Mantel Press Reviews
'A novel that magically creates an illusion of the Age of Enlightenment. Hilary Mantel puts the stink of the eighteenth century into our nostrils' Independent
'A novelist of remarkable diversity...She writes about curiosity, companionship, art, love, death and eternity. She writes with wit, compassion and great elegance. Her books never fail to surprise, nor to delight: in this one she is at her very best - so far' Independent on Sunday
'Mantel can out-write most writers of her generation, male and female. What she has done here is disturbing, grievous and extraordinary.' Maggie Gee, Sunday Times
'Filled with bizarre happenings, brazen images and characters whose earthiness you can smell.' TES
'Hilary Mantel has felt herself into the poetics of history with singular intensity.' New York Review
'Pathos and humour as they are elsewhere in the book are blended to perfection.' Sunday Telegraph
'Simultaneously vigorous and poetic, full of satisfying earthy details.' Sunday Independent (Ireland)
Author
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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