Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.

'She is by turns facetious, matter-of-fact, visionary and comical but always totally riveting.' Daily Telegraph'Simply astonishing – clear and true.' Guardian'An extraordinary story, sometimes comic, often grim, but most importantly it is a story of survival.' Spectator'A masterpiece of wit…[the] past, so thoroughly vanished, is made to live again here.' Rachel Cusk‘What a remarkable writer she is. She is piercingly, even laceratingly observant … a very startling and daring memoir; the more I read it the more unsettling it becomes.’ Helen Dunmore‘I was riveted. It’s raw, it’s distressing and it’s full of piercing insights into a first-rate novelist’s mind.’ Margaret Forster‘A stunning evocation of an ill-fitting childhood and a womanhood blighted by medical ineptitude. Hilary Mantel’s frank and beautiful memoir is impossible to put down and impossible to forget.’ Clare Boylan