MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Dispassionate, considered, forensic
TOM KING recommends a collection of acutely observed writings, from the personal to the political, by Hilary Mantel
MORDANT: Hilary Mantel
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
by Hilary Mantel
(4th Estate, £16.99)
HILARY MANTEL, most famous for her epic Thomas Cromwell trilogy — Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light — first made a name for herself on the 1980s book-reviewing scene.
It was very different in those days, she writes, with more daily papers “and they made space for books.”
She wrote for the Listener, the Literary Review and, forgive her, the Spectator. But she found a home at the London Review of Books (LRB), for which she has written ever since.
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