Learning to Talk: Stories
Written by Hilary Mantel
Narrated by Anna Bentinck, Jane Collingwood and Patrick Moy
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
"The multiple performances in this audiobook are uniformly adept, providing listeners the disarming experience of adults unflinchingly looking back at childhood." -AudioFile on Learning to Talk
Learning to Talk is a dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy.
With a new foreword by Hilary Mantel.
In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.
Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In “King Billy Is A Gentleman,” the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. “Curved Is the Line of Beauty" is a story of friendship, faith, and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In “Third Floor Rising," she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.
With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed.
“A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.” —USA Today
“Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.” —The Washington Post
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.
Editor's Note
Inspired…
Two-time Booker Prize-winner Mantel (“Wolf Hall,” “Bringing Up Bodies”) writes a short story collection dissecting pivotal childhood experiences. Inspired by her own upbringing in England but ultimately fiction, these stories reflect on identity, loss, family, home, and more — topics that leave a huge impact on our formative years and inform the choices we make as adults.
Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop in 1952. She is the author of ten novels, including Fludd, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall, as well as a collection, Learning to Talk: Short Stories, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She has won numerous prizes, among them the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, and in 2006 was made a CBE.
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