The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories by Hilary Mantel, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher Stories Copyright © 2014 Tertius Enterprises Ltd. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 SORRY TO DISTURB In those days, the doorbell didn't ring often, and if it did I would draw back into the body of the house. Only at a persistent ring would I creep over the carpets, and make my way to the front door with its spy hole. We were big on bolts and shutters, deadlocks and mortises, safety chains and windows that were high and barred. Through the spy hole I saw a distraught man in a crumpled, silver-gray suit: thirties, Asian. He had dropped back from the door, and was looking about him, at the closed and locked door opposite, and up the dusty marble stairs. He patted his pockets, took out a balled-up handkerchief, and rubbed it across his face. He looked so fraught that his sweat could have been tears. I opened the door. At once he raised his hands as if to show he was unarmed, his handkerchief dropping like a white flag.

"Madam!" Ghastly pale I must have looked, under the light that dappled the tiled walls with swinging shadows. But then he took a breath, tugged at his creased jacket, ran a hand through his hair and conjured up his business card. "Muhammad Ijaz. Import-Export. I am so sorry to disturb your afternoon. I am totally lost. Would you permit use of your telephone?" I stood aside to let him in. No doubt I smiled. Given what would ensue, I must suppose I did. "Of course. If it's working today." I walked ahead and he followed, talking; an important deal, he had almost closed it, visit to client in person necessary, time—he worked up his sleeve and consulted a fake Rolex—time running out; he had the address—again he patted his pockets—but the office is not where it should be. He spoke into the telephone in rapid Arabic, fluent, aggressive, his eyebrows shooting up, finally shaking his head; he put down the receiver, looked at it in regret; then up at me, with a sour smile. Weak mouth, I thought. Almost a handsome man, but not: slim, sallow, easily thrown.

"I am in your debt, madam," he said. "Now I must dash." I wanted to offer him a what—bathroom break? Comfort stop? I had no idea how to phrase it. The absurd phrase wash and brushup came into my mind. But he was already heading for the door—though from the way the call had concluded I thought they might not be so keen to see him, at his destination, as he was to see them. "This crazy city," he said. "They are always digging up the streets and moving them. I am so sorry to break in on your privacy." In the hall, he darted another glance around and up the stairs. "Only the British will ever help you." He skidded across the hall and prized open the outer door with its heavy ironwork screen; admitting, for a moment, the dull roar of traffic from Medina Road. The door swung back, he was gone. I closed the hall door discreetly, and melted into the oppressive hush. The air conditioner rattled away, like an old relative with a loose cough. The air was heavy with insecticide; sometimes I sprayed it as I walked, and it fell about me like bright mists, veils.

I resumed my phrasebook and tape, Fifth Lesson: I'm living in Jeddah. I'm busy today. God give you strength! When my husband came home in the afternoon I told him: "A lost man was here. Pakistani. Businessman. I let him in to phone." My husband was silent. The air conditioner hacked away. He walked into the shower, having evicted the cockroaches. Walked out again, dripping, naked, lay on the bed, stared at the ceiling. Next day I swept the business card into a bin. In the afternoon the doorbell rang again. Ijaz had come back, to apologize, to explain, to thank me for rescuing him. I made him some instant coffee and he sat down and told me about himself. * * * It was then June 1983. I had been in Saudi Arabia for six months. My husband worked for a Toronto-based company of consulting geologists, and had been seconded by them to the Ministry of Mineral Resources. Most of his colleagues were housed in family "compounds" of various sizes, but the single men and a childless couple like ourselves had to take what they could get. This was our second flat.

The American bachelor who had occupied it before had been moved out in haste. Upstairs, in this block of four flats, lived a Saudi civil servant with his wife and baby; the fourth flat was empty; on the ground floor across the hall from us lived a Pakistani accountant who worked for a government minister, handling his personal finances. Meeting the womenfolk in the hall or on the stairs—one blacked-out head to toe, one partly veiled—the bachelor had livened up their lives by calling "Hello!" Or possibly "Hi there!" There was no suggestion of further impertinence. But a complaint had been made, and he vanished, and we went to live there instead. The flat was small by Saudi standards. It had beige carpet and off-white wallpaper on which there was a faint crinkled pattern, almost indiscernible. The windows were guarded by heavy wooden shutters that you cranked down by turning a handle on the inside. Even with the shutters up it was dim and I needed the strip lights on all day. The rooms were closed off from each other by double doors of dark wood, heavy like coffin lids.

It was like living in a funeral home, with samples stacked around you, and insect opportunists frying themselves on the lights. * * * He was a graduate of a Miami business school, Ijaz said, and his business, his main business just now, was bottled water. Had the deal gone through, yesterday? He was evasive—obviously, there was nothing simple about it. He waved a hand—give it time, give it time. I had no friends in this city as yet. Social life, such as it was, centered on private houses; there were no cinemas, theaters or lecture halls. There were sports grounds, but women could not attend them. No "mixed gatherings" were allowed. The Saudis did not mix with foreign workers. They looked down on them as necessary evils, though white-skinned, English-speaking expatriates were at the top of the pecking order. Others—Ijaz, for example—were "Third Country Nationals," a label that exposed them to every kind of truculence, insult and daily complication. Indians and Pakistanis staffed the shops and small businesses. Filipinos worked on building sites. Men from Thailand cleaned the streets.

Bearded Yemenis sat on the pavement outside lock-up shops, their skirts rucked up, their hairy legs thrust out, their flip-flops inches from the whizzing cars. I am married, Ijaz said, and to an American; you must meet her. Maybe, he said, maybe you could do something for her, you know? What I foresaw at best was the usual Jeddah arrangement, of couples shackled together. Women had no motive power in this city; they had no driving licenses, and only the rich had drivers. So couples who wanted to visit must do it together. I didn't think Ijaz and my husband would be friends. Ijaz was too restless and nervy. He laughed at nothing. He was always twitching his collar and twisting his feet in their scuffed Oxfords, always tapping the fake Rolex, always apologizing. Our apartment is down by the port, he said, with my sister-in-law and my brother, but he's back in Miami just now, and my mother's here just now for a visit, and my wife from America, and my son and my daughter, aged six, aged eight.

He reached for his wallet and showed me a strange-looking, steeple-headed little boy. "Saleem." When he left, he thanked me again for trusting him to come into my house. Why, he said, he might have been anybody. But it is not the British way to think badly of needy strangers. At the door he shook my hand. That's that, I thought. Part of me thought, it had better be. * * * For one was always observed: overlooked, without precisely being seen, recognized. My Pakistani neighbor Yasmin, to get between my flat and hers, would fling a scarf over her rippling hair, then peep around the door; with nervous, pecking movements she hopped across the marble, head swiveling from side to side, in case someone should choose that very moment to shoulder through the heavy street door. Sometimes, irritated by the dust that blew under the door and banked up on the marble, I would go out into the hall with a long broom. My male Saudi neighbor would come down from the first floor on his way out to his car and step over my brushstrokes without looking at me, his head averted.

He was according me invisibility, as a mark of respect to another man's wife. I was not sure that Ijaz accorded me this respect. Our situation was anomalous and ripe for misunderstanding: I had an afternoon caller. He probably thought that only the kind of woman who took a lot of risks with herself would let a stranger into her house. Yet I could not guess what he probably thought. Surely a Miami business school, surely his time in the West, had made my attitude seem more normal than not? His talk was relaxed now he knew me, full of feeble jokes that he laughed at himself; but then there was the jiggling of his foot, the pulling of his collar, the tapping of his fingers. I had noticed, listening to my tape, that his situation was anticipated in the Nineteenth Lesson: I gave the address to my driver, but when we arrived, there wasn't any house at this address. I hoped to show by my brisk friendliness what was only the truth, that our situation could be simple, because I felt no attraction to him at all; so little that I felt apologetic about it.

That is where it began to go wrong—my feeling that I must bear out the national character he had given me, and that I must not slight him or refuse a friendship, in case he thought it was because he was a Third Country National. For his second visit, and his third, were an interruption, almost an irritation. Having no choice in that city, I had decided to cherish my isolation, coddle it. I was ill in those days, and subject to a fierce drug regime that gave me blinding headaches, made me slightly deaf and made me, though I was hungry, unable to eat. The drugs were expensive and had to be imported from England; my husband's company brought them in by courier. Word of this leaked out, and the company wives decided I was taking fertility drugs; but I did not know this, and my ignorance made our conversations peculiar and, to me, slightly menacing. Why were they always talking, on the occasions of forced company sociability, about women who'd had miscarriages but now had a bouncing babe in the buggy? An older woman confided that her two were adopted; I looked at them and thought Jesus, where from, the zoo?

My Pakistani neighbour also joined in the cooing over the offspring that I would have shortly—she was in on the rumors, but I put her hints down to the fact that she was carrying her first child and wanted company. I saw her most mornings for an interval of coffee and chat, and I would rather steer her to talking about Islam, which was easy enough; she was an educated woman and keen to instruct. June 6th: "Spent two hours with my neighbor," says my diary, "widening the cultural gap." Next day, my husband brought home air tickets and my exit visa for our first home leave, which was seven weeks away. Thursday, June 9th: "Found a white hair in my head." At home there was a general election, and we sat up through the night to listen to the results on the BBC World Service. When we turned out the light, the grocer's daughter jigged through my dreams to the strains of "Lillibulero." Friday was a holiday, and we slept undisturbed till the noon prayer call. Ramadan began.

Wednesday, June 15th: "Read The Twyborn Affair and vomited sporadically." On the sixteenth our neighbors across the hall left for pilgrimage, robed in white. They rang our doorbell before they left: "Is there anything we can bring you from Mecca?" June 19th saw me desperate for change, moving the furniture around the sitting room and recording "not much improvement." I write that I am prey to "unpleasant and intrusive thoughts," but I do not say what they are. I describe myself as "hot, sick and morose." By July 4th I must have been happier, because I listened to the Eroica while doing the ironing. But on the morning of July 10th, I got up first, put the coffee on, and went into the sitting room to find that the furniture had been trying to move itself back. An armchair was leaning to the left, as if executing some tipsy dance; at one side its base rested on the carpet, but the other side was a foot in the air, and balanced finely on the rim of a flimsy wastepaper basket.

Open-mouthed, I shot back into the bedroom; it was the Eid holiday, and my husband was still half awake. I gibbered at him. Silent, he rose, put on his glasses, and followed me. He stood in the doorway of the sitting room. He looked around and told me without hesitation it had nothing to do with him. He walked into the bathroom. I heard him close the door, curse the cockroaches, switch on the shower. I said later, I must be walking in my sleep. Do you think that's it? Do you think I did it? July 12th: "Execution dream again." The trouble was, Ijaz knew I was at home; how would I be going anywhere? One afternoon I left him standing in the hall, while he pressed and pressed the doorbell, and next time, when I let him in, he asked me where I had been; when I said, "Ah, sorry, I must have been with my neighbor," I could see he did not believe me, and he looked at me so sorrowfully that my heart went out to him.

Jeddah fretted him, it galled him, and he missed, he said, America, he missed his visits to London, he must go soon, take a break; when was our leave, perhaps we might meet up? I explained I did not live in London, which surprised him; he seemed to suspect it was an evasion, like my failure to answer the door. "Because I could get an exit visa," he said again. "Meet up there. Without all this ..." he gestured at the coffin-lid doors, the heavy, willful furniture. He made me laugh that day, telling me about his first girlfriend, his American girlfriend whose nickname was Patches. It was easy to picture her, sassy and suntanned, astonishing him one day by pulling off her top, bouncing her bare breasts at him and putting an end to his wan virginity. The fear he felt, the terror of touching her ... his shameful performance ... recalling it, he knuckled his forehead. I was charmed, I suppose. How often does a man tell you these things? I told my husband, hoping to make him laugh, but he didn't.

Often, to be helpful, I hoovered up the cockroaches before his return from the Ministry. He shed his clothes and headed off. I heard the splash of the shower. Nineteenth Lesson: Are you married? Yes, my wife is with me, she's standing there in the corner of the room. I imagined the cockroaches, dark and flailing in the dust bag. I went back to the dining table, on which I was writing a comic novel. It was a secret activity I never mentioned to the company wives, and barely mentioned to myself. I scribbled under the strip light, until it was time to drive out for food shopping. You had to shop between sunset prayers and night prayers; if you mistimed it, then at the first prayer call the shops slammed down their shutters, trapping you inside, or outside in the wet heat of the car park. The malls were patrolled by volunteers from the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice. At the end of July Ijaz brought his family for tea.

Mary-Beth was a small woman but seemed swollen beneath the skin; spiritless, freckled, limp, she was a faded redhead who seemed huddled into herself, unused to conversation. A silent daughter with eyes like dark stars had been trussed up for the visit in a frilly white dress. At six, steeple-headed Saleem had lost his baby fat, and his movements were tentative, as if his limbs were snappable. His eyes were watchful; Mary-Beth hardly met my gaze at all. What had Ijaz told her? That he was taking her to see a woman who was something like he'd like her to be? It was an unhappy afternoon. I can only have got through it because I was buoyed by an uprush of anticipation; my bags were packed for our flight home. A day earlier, when I had gone into the spare room where I kept my clothes, I had met another dismaying sight. The doors of the fitted wardrobe, which were large and solid like the other coffin lids, had been removed from their hinges; they had been replaced, but hung by the lower hinges only, so that their upper halves flapped like the wings of some ramshackle flying machine.

On August 1st we left King Abdulaziz International Airport in an electrical storm, and had a bumpy flight. I was curious about Mary-Beth's situation and hoped to see her again, though another part of me hoped that she and Ijaz would simply vanish. * * * I didn't return to Jeddah till the very end of November, having left my book with an agent. Just before our leave I had met my Saudi neighbor, a young mother taking a part-time literature course at the women's university. Education for women was regarded as a luxury, an ornament, a way for a husband to boast of his broadmindedness; Munira couldn't even begin to do her assignments, and I took to going up to her flat in the late mornings and doing them for her, while she sat on the floor in her négligée, watching Egyptian soaps on TV and eating sunflower seeds. We three women, Yasmin and Munira and I, had become midmorning friends; all the better for them to watch me, I thought, and discuss me when I'm gone.

It was easier for Yasmin and me to go upstairs, because to come down Munira had to get kitted out in full veil and abaya; again, that treacherous, hovering moment on the public territory of the staircase, where a man might burst through from the street and shout "Hi!" Yasmin was a delicate woman, like a princess in a Persian miniature; younger than myself, she was impeccably soignée, finished with a flawless glaze of good manners and restraint. Munira was nineteen, with coarse, eager good looks, a pale skin, and a mane of hair that crackled with static and seemed to lead a vital, separate life; her laugh was a raucous cackle. She and Yasmin sat on cushions but gave me a chair; they insisted. They served Nescafé in my honor, though I would have preferred a sludgy local brew. I had learned the crude effectiveness of caffeine against migraine; some nights, sleepless, pacing, I careened off the walls, and only the dawn prayer call sent me to bed, still thinking furiously of books I might write. (Continues...) Excerpted from The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel.

Copyright © 2014 Tertius Enterprises Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher · Hilary Mantel · Book Review Hilary Mantel assassinates Margaret Thatcher with a new collection · Book Review · The A.V. Club Share Tweet The best short story is both a writer’s study in language and a reader’s study in emotion. It’s not necessarily a snapshot in time (though it sometimes accomplishes that, too); a good short story will pick at a scab, making a tiny wound itchy and uncomfortable until the scab disappears in a trail of blood. Or the story will end, leaving the reader still scratching, trying to find some comfort. A short story isn’t an abbreviated novel, it’s an entirely different way of investigating humanity. And the shorter the story, the more demanding a writer has to be of each word in order to keep the reader in their thrall.

Hilary Mantel’s new collection of short stories, The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher, delivers on its promises: the promise built by Mantel’s reputation as one of the unquestionably great contemporary writers, the promise made by its shocking title, and the promise inherent in the genre of short stories. From the opening salvo, a rich narrative called “Sorry To Disturb,” to the final titular short story, Mantel’s prose is precise and imaginative. But more than just a writer’s writer, she probes fears both simple and terrifying: loneliness, starvation, poverty, and more loneliness. Most of the stories are told in first person, and it’s a bit of fun trying to suss out each narrator in turn—some are writers, like the narrator in “Sorry To Disturb,” which draws from Mantel’s own experience living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during the 1980s, and examines cultural differences on a deeply personal level. “Comma” is told by a young girl who is learning what it means to be rich and to be poor, and Mantel even brings something new to the trope of children discovering a strange house inhabited by strange people.

In one of the few told in the third person, “The Heart Fails Without Warning,” Mantel tells the story of a severely anorexic girl, and despite the outcome ostensibly being given away in the title, it’s still compulsive, page-turning reading. Of the 10 collected stories, most are tremendous in both prose and narrative, though not all of them sink into the bones. It’s hard to be critical of a writer as exact as Mantel, though, for even in the stories that are slightly more forgettable, the language is still evocative—perhaps these are stories to analyze in seminars and workshops, not ones to read on a gray Saturday morning, losing oneself in Mantel storm clouds for the rest of the day. Nine of the 10 stories (all but the title story) have been published previously between 1993 and 2012. That may be a con for fans who have been devouring Mantel’s work as it’s published, but “The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher,” the final, previously unpublished story, is so good, so provocative, that it’s worth the cover price.

As its title suggests, the story imagines the assassination of the late Iron Lady at the height of the IRA activity in the ’80s. The narrator is a woman whose apartment is convenient for a sniper; and so the tale unfolds from her perspective as her flat is taken over by the assassin. It’s an inspired way to investigate the wrongs of the Thatcher premiership 20-some years after its end—not through its lingering policies, but through two strangers sitting together in an apartment, one planning a murder, and one who had only been expecting the furnace repairman. Mantel’s successes in these stories are more than just an economy of language, her ability to say so much with so little, though that is celebrated here. But in stories like “Sorry To Disturb” and “The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher,” Mantel pokes and prods and scratches at our tiny collective wounds, opening them into something much bigger. Readers may find the stories uncomfortable, but also hard to put down.

Hilary Mantel - Author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher Hilary Mantel Read an Excerpt from The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel’s trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display. Stories of dislocation and family fracture, of whimsical infidelities and sudden deaths with sinister causes, brilliantly unsettle the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way. Cutting to the core of human experience, Mantel brutally and acutely writes about marriage, class, family, and sex. Unpredictable, diverse, and sometimes shocking, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers. Watch the trailer for Wolf Hall starring Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn. Wolf Hall premiers 1/21 on BBC Two in the UK, and 4/5 on PBS Masterpiece in the USA. How Shall I Know You?

- An E-Short In How Shall I Know You?, a melancholic and ailing writer reluctantly travels east of London to give a lecture before a literary society. Mr. Simister, the organization’s secretary, lures the world-weary novelist turned biographer with promises of a modest stipend and lodging at a charming bed-and-breakfast for her trouble. Nevertheless, on that rainy day she meets Mr. Simister at the train station, she wonders why she ever agreed to come in the first place. Driving past steel-shuttered windows and Day-Glo banners, Mr. Simister takes the writer to her hotel for the evening, which turns out to be crumbling and isolated rather than picturesque. As she crosses the threshold into the dank stench of Eccles House she is faced with the feral porter, Louise, and suffers through an evening that may be more than she bargained for. Wolf Hall WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn.

The pope and most of Europe oppose him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? Bring Up the Bodies WINNER OF THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE Though he battled for years to marry her—a story told in Wolf Hall—Henry is now disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son, and her sharp intelligence alienates his old friends and the noble families of England. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over a few terrifying weeks, Cromwell ensnares her in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour waits her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle, and to defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must now ally himself with his enemies. What price will he pay for Anne’s head? Buy the Book!

Beyond Black Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. This is Hilary Mantel at her finest--insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read. Buy the Book! Giving Up the Ghost In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most improbable of accomplishments, including "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay," were within her grasp. Once married, however, she acquired a persistent pain that led to destructive drugs and patronizing psychiatry, ending in an ineffective but irrevocable surgery. There would be no children; in herself she found instead one novel, and then another. Buy the Book!

The Giant O’Brien London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. In the midst of it all is the Giant, O’Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in myths, fairies, miracles, and little people. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. O’Brien's opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter, who lusts after the Giant's corpse as a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge. Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of Ireland and England. As belief wrestles knowledge and science wrestles song, so The Giant, O’Brien calls to us from a fork in the road as a tale of time, and a timeless tale. Buy the Book! An Experiment in Love It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence.

Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with recollections of her childhood and an ever difficult relationship with her longtime schoolmate Karina, Carmel reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper. When these bright but confused young women land in late 1960s London, they are confronted with a slew of new preoccupations--sex, politics, food, and fertility--and a pointless grotesque tragedy of their own. Buy the Book! A Change of Climate Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. Thirty years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and thirty years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were. Buy the Book! A Place of Greater Safety It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way.

Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden--and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. In the swells of revolution, they each taste the addictive delights of power, and the price that must be paid for it. Buy the Book! Fludd One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin-or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. No matter how copiously Father Angwin drinks while he confesses his broken faith, the level of the bottle does not drop.

Although Fludd does not appear to be eating, the food on his plate disappears. Knitting together the miraculous and the mundane, the dreadful and the ludicrous, Fludd is a tale of alchemy and transformation told with astonishing art, insight, humor, and wit. Buy the Book! Eight Months on Ghazza Street When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the floor above, and seeing the flitting shadows of men on the stairwell. It’s all in her imagination, she’s told by her neighbors; the upstairs flat is empty, no one uses the roof. But Frances knows otherwise, and day by day, her sense of foreboding grows even as her sense of herself begins to disintegrate. Buy the Book! Vacant Possession Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon did her ma in, ten years of living in a mental asylum. But Muriel has not forgotten her welfare worker, Isabel, or her neighbor, Colin. Nor has she forgiven.

There are still scores to be settled-and vengeance to be wreaked. In a novel that is wildly funny and daringly wicked, Mantel brings the full force of her black humor to bear on a cast of characters that is by turns wacky and malevolent. Buy the Book! Every Day is Mother's Day Evelyn Axon is a medium by trade; her daughter, Muriel, is a half-wit by nature. Barricaded in their crumbling house, surrounded by the festering rubbish of years, they defy the curiosity of their neighbors and their social worker, Isabel Field. Isabel is young and inexperienced and has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders the streets, and a lover, Colin, who wants her to run away with him. But Colin has three horrible children and a shrill wife who is pregnant again--how is he going to run anywhere? As Isabel wrestles with her own problems, a horrible secret grows in the darkness of the Axon household. When at last it comes to light, the result is by turns hilarious and terrifying.

Hilary Mantel Interview: Margaret Thatcher "Wrecked This Country" | New Republic By Isaac Chotiner October 5, 2014 The British writer Hilary Mantel may be best known for intricate historical reconstructions of life in Tudor England, but that doesn’t mean she is afraid of a modern-day tabloid brawl. The title story of her latest collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, describes the fictional assassination of the former prime minister in 1983 at the hands of an IRA gunman. Naturally, it has been interpreted by British conservatives as authorial wish fulfillment. Lord Timothy Bell, a former Thatcher adviser, called on the police to investigate Mantel, and a Tory member of Parliament described her as “sick and deranged.” The Daily Telegraph refused to even publish the story after having paid the author a hefty advance for it. This is not the first time Mantel, who is 62, has found herself the target of national condemnation.

Last year, in a lecture, she referred to Kate Middleton as a “shop-window mannequin.” The talk was actually a subtle attack on the cult of monarchy and the fetishization of the female body (and rather sympathetic toward Middleton), but British paparazzi camped outside Mantel’s house and even Prime Minister David Cameron publicly criticized the speech. A leap forward to Thatcher’s Britain may seem like a departure for Mantel. She won widespread praise for Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which serve as a reappraisal of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s often-reviled chief minister and enforcer, and Thomas More, the reactionary Catholic who has usually been cast as a saint and martyr. (Theatrical adaptations arrive on Broadway next year; she is currently working on the final book of the trilogy.) And yet Mantel’s primary talent is her ability to describe, with great precision, the endless mental calculations about status and desire and power that comprise politics in every era, and to capture the functioning of institutions with drama and wit. The century may vary, but the sensibility translates. When I e-mailed Mantel to schedule an interview, she responded with remarkable warmth.

(She began signing off, “Love, Hilary,” after only a few communications.) We met on a rainy August afternoon at her top-floor apartment in the village of Sunningdale, just outside of London, which has a large fireplace and rugs and walls that are stunningly white. We were joined by her husband, Gerald McEwen, who cares for Mantel. (She suffers from the gynecological disease endometriosis, which somewhat limits her mobility.) I have never felt like I was visiting people who were more excited to see me, even though we had never met. After the conversation turned to Booker Prize winners, McEwen broke into a wide grin. “You are sitting with a Booker Prize winner right now, for Wolf Hall,” he said playfully. “Don’t forget Bring Up the Bodies,” Mantel mischievously responded. (She is one of only three authors to have won the award twice.) Mantel has been a novelist and essayist for many years, but her fame arrived relatively late, and she and McEwen evidently view it with wry amusement. During our conversation, we discussed the differences between historians and novelists, Britain’s male-dominated literary culture, and the legacy of a certain prime minister.

Isaac Chotiner: How do you view Margaret Thatcher today? Hilary Mantel: I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that she wrecked this country. I loathed her. But that’s not so interesting. IC: It’s interesting to me. HM: She aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That’s the fact that interests me. What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with her is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon. I think psychologically she is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore’s biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own. IC: Do you think that is what bothers you, the contempt for history? HM: I think it does, hugely. This is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for “Who’s Who,” didn’t include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.

Perhaps when it was pointed out to her that she was born of woman ... IC: It wasn’t a virgin birth. HM: [Laughs] She admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother! IC: Do you think some of the fascination has to do with the fact that she is a woman in the public eye? HM: Yes, I think it is a very big part. I can’t think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate—mainly hate—the way she did. But we have a number of very powerful women in the world now—Mrs. Merkel, who the Germans call Mutti. What did we call Mrs. Thatcher? IC: Salman Rushdie coined “Mrs. Torture” in The Satanic Verses. HM: Well yes, but worse. When she was minister of education, she stopped the children’s free school milk. This may sound quaint, but after the war we were such a malnourished nation that part of the founding of the welfare state were public health initiatives. Every little schoolchild got milk. Mrs. Thatcher stopped it.

They called her “Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher.” Now imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. She takes away the nourishment of the nation. IC: It seems like part of what bothers you is indeed her being a woman and pursuing the policies she did. HM: Yes, I think that is true. It was unfortunate for other women who might come after her that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator. And in order to successfully impersonate men, the woman launched a war. [laughs] IC: You mean the Falklands War? HM: Yes. She scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper. She was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew. She was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn’t true. IC: Sadly, the current American president does the same thing. He talks about how households need to balance their budgets and therefore the country does, too. HM: True. And I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But she carried it to extremes.

It was complete bullshit and she knew it. But she assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing. IC: You mean juvenile in terms of intelligence, not age, I assume. HM: I believe this was her estimate of the voter: “These people are so stupid that they will vote for me because they think I know how to run the household.” IC: She did win three times though. HM: She did. I can’t deny that. [pauses] It was not possible at that time to see where it was trending. What she made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy. Otherwise, she said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist. IC: Methodist, right? HM: Yes, but public duty to the fore.

One of the ideals she grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox. IC: Hillary Clinton is often seen as acting tougher because of the constraints of being a woman in politics. Do you see Thatcher parallels? HM: Everything you say may be true about what women need to do in public life. To me, Hillary looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn’t seem to have distorted her essential nature. IC: I think most Americans, whether they like Thatcher or not, view her as sincere rather than constructed. And I think many people view the Clintons as constructed. Maybe this is the distance with which Americans view British politics and vice versa. HM: That is very interesting. To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent. IC: That is a bigger thing in the United Kingdom. HM: It is. It would be comic if it weren’t so tragic. IC: For the record, is this your real accent? HM: It is. It is.

It is not the accent I was born with. IC: Oh, we are getting somewhere. HM: But I have lived a lot of different places. 1 Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn’t fake the quality of her mind. IC: How did you come to think about the title story, which concerns her assassination in 1983? HM: I saw it happen, so to speak. I lived on the street described [in the story]. I looked out on the window described. And I saw her come out on the grounds of the hospital as described. And certain thoughts passed through my head. I have been living with it ever since. I have tried to write it any number of times, but I couldn’t make it come out. Then a few months ago, I just got so tired of the whole thing and I said, I am not leaving the house until I make the story work. I had nine stories and I needed a tenth. IC: You must know you are going to get some trouble for this. HM: It is describing a “might have been.” And every leader operates under the threat of assassination.

I will get into trouble, I am sure, because since my Kate Middleton speech and before, certain papers were after me. I am not saying, however, that it would have been moral or right to assassinate Mrs. Thatcher, but I know it will be read that way. I know it will cause a problem. IC: Have you been following this debate in Britain about how patriotic to make the curriculum? 2 HM: In a mild way. I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative. When people begin to talk about “our island story” my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative. IC: I was wondering how you feel about the monarchy today, and how much the existence of the monarchy strengthens things you find distasteful about the national story. HM: I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn’t have a huge effect on the national mind-set. I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can’t find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go. There is so much else in the world that is more interesting.

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur. When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never there before. I didn’t feel it was my history particularly, coming from Northern Britain, being of Irish extraction, being a cradle Catholic. The image of England I grew up with felt somewhere else. There was an official England in postcards, but it wasn’t one I had visited. But I decided to march onto the center ground and occupy it whether it was mine or not. IC: You mention being a cradle Catholic, and I gather you don’t practice anymore? HM: No. IC: In your books, the picture of Thomas More, who is a Catholic hero to many people, is very bleak. It feels like you set out to correct the record about him and the fact that he was an extremist. HM: To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up—his burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes. IC: Dunkirk. HM: Yes.

The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics. IC: I am not sure Catholics have just been romanticized in England. They have been persecuted. HM: Yes, of course. But people will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with. IC: What is that experience of adaptation into theater like? HM: When we began, there was only one book. What was actually commissioned was one play. Now that we have two plays, the complexities multiply. And then the Royal Shakespeare Company got involved. I’ve become more and more drawn into it. At the same time as the play adaptations, the BBC adaptation has been marching forward. A different take on the material. I have been less involved with the television production than with the theater. But this is unique because it is a work in progress. I haven’t finished the third book. In this case, it is alive! IC: Is it strange to see actors give their own spin to your characters? HM: It helps hugely with the third book. The third book, in subtle ways, feeds back into the plays. IC: It makes you think about the characters in different ways? HM: It concentrates you on the present moment.

It also reminds me, watching it, that characters did not know their fate. IC: They must have had some sense, dealing with Henry VIII. 3 HM: That was a tricky business. You might think you can outlive him. Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result. IC: Speaking of process, I am curious what the step is between historical research and then writing fiction from that. HM: For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot. One of the frustrations of someone like Thomas Cromwell is that, before they step into the light of history, and become extremely well documented, they are not known. A king might be well documented but not everyone.

IC: So you feel like you have more license if we don’t have the facts? HM: Yes, but it is not favored. The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is. [laughs] I am not a historian. I don’t see what I do as being a rival to biography. It’s complementary. It’s fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations will have a root somewhere. IC: I am going to make up things you said for this interview based on things you said previously. Fill in the gaps. HM: But you have me here to ask any question you like! IC: We have been talking about monarchy, but you lived in a non-constitutional one, in Saudi Arabia, in the 1980s. And one of your stories takes place there. HM: What a wonderful opportunity!

How many people in the present day have the chance to not only live in an absolute monarchy but in a theocracy? They were domestic circumstances. It was like a Gothic novel if you are a woman. When I landed at King Abdullah International Airport at three a.m. for the first time, I thought, I am going to get a book out of this. I hadn’t published anything, but I knew. That’s what made me able to stand it. We got to live in a flat in the city. That meant we got to see society. IC: When 9/11 happened, did you feel like you had a different perspective than other people? HM: I thought totally so. I have a great and genuine respect for Islam, which I got when I was there. But I also saw the tendencies that led to war against the West. That was in every conversation. IC: Where do you think it comes from? HM: It comes from quite primitive impulses. Where does anti-Semitism come from? To see the vile cartoons in the Arab press ... The Holocaust denial. You have maps and Israel isn’t on them! That is institutional, it is official. The information that people had about the West was so heavily distorted.

Of course it comes as a shock, however much you know it theoretically. It’s an education. It’s beliefs about women and law and morality and society. It was quite fascinating. You can’t get it out of books. You have to have the conversations. IC: I was going to ask about other historical novelists you might like. In the last fifty years or so, Norman Mailer has tried it. Gore Vidal. HM: My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre. People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn’t want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England. I loved Gore Vidal’s Burr. That book gave me courage. Thomas Keneally, the Australian author. IC: What other writers and essayists have you been influenced by? You also write essays. HM: When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do. The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett. 4 Usually saying this ends a conversation. IC: I am going to leave. HM: I couldn’t get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don’t read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention. If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of her books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back. In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me. IC: I heard a story that you were at a literary event with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan. And Hitchens said that he stood in a corner being social only with his friends and that he felt so embarrassed afterward. He said he acted like a high-schooler. HM: Oh, bless him. It was a very funny conference. I knew him before that.

He had always been a good angel to me. He once stole a phrase from me that came out of his mouth on television. I saw his eyes move sideways. I thought, It’s alright, you can have it! The conference was light on women. Salman Rushdie showed up, they were doing their own thing. I didn’t feel neglected! They took us on a walk for miles and miles. It was a themed garden. Hitchens was so unfit that he kept trying to take shortcuts. It was like Alice in Wonderland, because he would appear on top of a hill and realize he was on the wrong side of a river or in the wrong place. I remember the helplessness on his face. I was rather fond of him. Thanks to her husband’s work as a geologist, Mantel has lived in the Middle East and Africa. Michael Gove, the UK’s former secretary of education, had pushed for a more patriotic curriculum; this was opposed by many academics and writers. He had a tendency to execute his enemies. The English writer who wrote about the upper classes, and is famous for her witty dialogue. Read More Sign up for your daily dose of politics, culture, and big ideas.

Sign Up Hilary Mantel Author - The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Photo: Courtesy of Publisher Mantel's battles around health have abated only very recently. In fact, the Booker came at something of a crisis point. As she was finishing Wolf Hall, McEwen became seriously ill: "A ghastly business," Mantel says, "surgical emergency and intensive care and all the rest of it." Although he recovered, it was apparent that he wouldn't be able to resume his punishingly peripatetic career. Happily, Mantel's prize money and burgeoning best-seller earnings opened up another possibility: He became her manager—"my minder," she says, laughing, although she's quick to point out that he, not she, is the creative member of the partnership. "It isn't quite like people think. They think that Gerald works his way through stacks of paperwork, and I sit with my mouth slightly ajar, staring at the wall with pink bubbles coming out of my head. And actually I'm the one with the list." Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Mantel was also "very, very ill" again with further complications stemming from endometriosis in the period between her Booker prizes.

Writing with her customarily grim and stoic humor about the experience in the London Review of Books, she described her stomach as being sliced open like a watermelon—"Yes," she says, giggling again, "a wound you could drive a bus through." The morphine she was given in the hospital brought on florid dreams and hallucinations: In addition to visitations by the devil and a circus strongman, she encountered a rumpled man in an "awful jumper" whom she immediately recognized as the missing element of a story she'd been trying to finish for 30 years—"The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher." Most Popular This method of work is characteristic of Mantel. She's a formidable researcher who will spend decades diligently ferreting through the historical record and assembling meticulous card indexes. She doesn't meddle with the facts, make people appear where they couldn't, or assign them modern thoughts (so while Mantel is "absolutely" a feminist, her Anne Boleyn, with her "constricted viewpoint," is certainly not). All the same, there's an unmistakably eerie element to what Mantel does: a summoning of and speaking with the dead.

Although she insists that she has "a very constrained imagination" and is happiest working within a scaffolding of fact, she is nonetheless adept at the act of mediumship that fiction requires. More than any other historical novelist I can think of, she also has a knack for conveying the slipperiness of time, the way it sloshes backward and forward, changing even as you watch. "History and memory is the theme," she agrees, "how experience is transmuted into history, and how memory goes to work and works it over. It's the impurity, the flawed nature of history, its transience—that's really what fascinates me." The novelist Margaret Atwood has singled out Mantel as "an exceptionally good writer," and the esteemed literary critic James Wood has written that "she seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real.… In short, this novelist has the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting." Yet despite its sometimes luxuriant trappings, its lavish appeal to the senses, Mantel's fictional world is not a comfortable place to inhabit.

Whatever era she's working in, her dominant tone is bleakly comic, and her primary subject the oppression of the weak by the strong, the claustrophobia with which circumstance can close around a person. "There's a pull to the darkness, it's true," she says. "You choose to laugh in the face of it, I think. Your best weapon against the devil is ridicule. That's in many ways the weapon of the powerless, but it's a case of using what you have." The need to resist malevolent forces began very early in Mantel's own life. She was born Hilary Thompson in the summer of 1952 in Hadfield, a "fiercely sectarian" village near Manchester, in the north of England, situated on the edge of the moors. Both her parents' families were Irish Catholic, and she remembers being puzzled as a child by the difference between Catholics and Protestants. "Like the fact we had a piano and they didn't: Was that Catholic?" This sense of schism deepened abruptly when in 1958 her mother's lover, Jack, came to live in the family home.

Divorces were expensive in those days, which was perhaps why her father stayed on in the house, demoted to a lesser bedroom, an increasingly tenuous and uncertain figure. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Everyone knew what was going on. "It was like putting yourself in the village stocks and then throwing away the key," Mantel says. At the same time, an oppressive silence reigned. Hilary's mother stopped going out, enlisting a relative to do the shopping. She had two more sons, though it was years before Hilary figured out that both were also her own father's children (which Jack, she thinks, may never have realized). Things went on like this until Hilary was 11—a state of affairs she still finds baffling. "You would think that any way of sorting their situation out would be preferable to remaining stuck, yet that's what they did, and so it went on and on." In the end, her mother left her father, moving the rest of the family to a village eight miles away, where they assumed Jack's surname and embarked on a new life as the Mantels, though everyone knew exactly who they were.

Her mother was ruthless about the past, excising all records of her former existence, including every photograph of her first husband: not an easy process when part of the evidence is your own flesh and blood. "As I got older," Mantel says, "I realized that she'd written her first marriage out of history completely, so that she was pretending to people not only that the boys were Jack's children but that I was too." As a child, Mantel had a toxically uneasy relationship with her stepfather. "He had considerable capacity for frightening people," she says. All the same, she knew that though she was only a dainty wisp of a girl, burdened by a mass of pale hair, she frightened him too. "You know these angry men, they're used to people shrinking back and, over time, accommodating their personality around the anger. And I think that Jack felt I was the immovable object. Not that I was in any way oppositional or defiant or talked back to him. But I think he knew he couldn't get to me inside. And of course, I was the one who retained all the memories, all the secrets." As for her real father, she never saw him again.

He died not long before Giving Up the Ghost was published, but the book did lure some aspects of him back. In the intervening years, he had remarried, and after Mantel's memoir came out one of his stepdaughters contacted her. Photographs were handed over, along with her father's army record. Best of all was his traveling chess set, a magical object from her childhood: They used to play the game together, and now here it was, less prepossessing than she'd remembered, and faded from burgundy to the pinkish-gray of human skin. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Mantel didn't really grasp the extent of her loss until she was shown a series of wedding photos of another young woman being walked into church on her father's arm. "I found that a little hard," she says. "I didn't know how much I wanted him until I saw those." It was some consolation to discover that though she'd lost touch with him, he did know what had happened to her. He'd caught sight of her once on television and said to his stepdaughter, "That's my daughter.

And she looks so like her mother." Concealed parentage, dissolved marriages, enforced secret-keeping, a powerful figure with a desire to wrestle with or rewrite history: Mantel's childhood certainly provided her with an intimate understanding of the dynamics of Henry VIII's court. The other major influence of her youth was the Church, which left her with the usual reservoir of guilt but at the same time provided "a brilliant training for a writer" in that it introduced her, she says, to the presence of a deeper, more powerful reality coexistent with the seen world. At age 11, Mantel was so devout that she might well have become a nun, but then she abruptly lost her faith. She took up with communism instead, and as a teenager she considered going into politics herself. Always a brilliant student, she went to college to study law, but health and money—a lack of both—got in the way. She wasn't going to be capable of an active public life. So instead, she wrote about politics and power and the ways in which people grapple and advance or scupper and topple themselves.

Courtesy of Publisher Photo: Courtesy of Publisher In the story "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher," Mantel imagines conversing with a man who has tricked his way into her flat in order to shoot the prime minister, who's currently in residence at a hospital across the street. What did Mantel think of Thatcher, a figure who, after all, has something in common with her beloved Cromwell, that dogged outsider among England's ruling classes? Mantel's answer gives a strong sense of the values by which she steers. "Mrs. Thatcher only recognized communal values in the military sense," she says. "She was all for saluting the flag and slaughtering the foe, but she didn't recognize the positive strengths of the community and of the collective. And her struggle to be this lonely being, this superwoman, had practical effects in the real world. It killed people. I see her as an extremely defective human being." Most Popular As well as Thatcher, the new story collection touches upon Jeddah, anorexia, adultery, and secrets, often hinging on the inability of the present to disentangle itself from the past.

Many of the stories contain autobiographical elements, combined disquietingly with the paranormal or the grotesque. Mantel doesn't write stories often, and they can take years to come together. "A short story hangs by a cobweb," she explains. "You can't wrestle it into submission. You've got to hold out your hand, and it's got to come to you, just come and settle." It's a trade, is what it is, a thing you work at, developing your skill, biding your time until you're ready to march out and claim your territory, "your flags flying and your drums beating," Mantel says. She got the measure of it young, reading Jane Eyre and Kidnapped and puzzling out their essential stories: of a madwoman in an attic, and of a boy who leaves home. "These are still governing me all the time," she says. "And then I found Shakespeare, so I found history. So that was it: my influences.

By the time I was 11, it was all done and dusted." Jane Eyre: Mantel sits for a moment, thinking about it, gleefully reconstructing the part where Rochester leaves Jane outside a closed door to wait, and she's frozen, unable to make sense of the terrifying shouts and groans coming from within. "I think," Mantel says with relish, "that's one of the most frightening things in English fiction—that she can hear the sound, but she mustn't go beyond the door." And for a moment she looks away, eyes gleaming, a woman who has spent the best part of a lifetime imagining the things that might be going on in the locked room of the past, the done-with, or the never-was, the unmappable region of the interior. This article originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. More from ELLE: Unnerving short stories by Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates - The Washington Post Unnerving short stories by Hilary Mantel, Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost.

Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher" by Hilary Mantel. (Henry Holt) By Wendy Smith By Wendy Smith September 29, 2014 Little is for certain in these unnerving short story collections by three of the most gifted writers in contemporary literature. Longtime marriages come undone, friendships fray, eyes and ears report impossible things. Hilary Mantel follows a dead father riding a train; Margaret Atwood sends a squadron of tiny people climbing up a nightstand; and Joyce Carol Oates hears children’s cries coming from a house that burned down long ago.The only thing you can be sure of is that any unease these stories prompt is precisely what their authors intended. Mantel wins the deliberate-provocation sweepstakes with the title story of “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher .” The tale raised an outcry in England when the Guardian published it online this month.

But imagining the attempted murder of a controversial public figure who in real life is already dead hardly seems out of bounds, and Mantel’s critics in the United Kingdom missed the most interesting aspect of her story: She evokes a shadowy region where boundaries blur and what might have happened has equal weight with what actually occurred. The fire door through which her narrator proposes to let the would-be assassin escape “is visible only to the eye of faith,” Mantel writes. Yet “note the power of the door in the wall that you never saw was there. . . . History could always have been otherwise.” Despite the plethora of sharply observed social detail, her short stories always recognize other potential realities. In “How Shall I Know You?” the grind of poorly attended library talks and chats with clueless book groups is juxtaposed with the pound notes that multiply in the author’s purse and computer disks that “periodically erased themselves in the night.” Wardrobes remove their own doors and post office boxes move about town in “Sorry to Disturb,” a quietly scathing depiction of women’s restricted lives in Saudi Arabia. It closes with a surreal image of “furniture . . .

frolicking in the dark.” Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales (“Offenses Against the Person,” “The Heart Fails Without Warning”) retain a faintly otherworldly air. By contrast, Atwood’s stories in “Stone Mattress” are emphatically of this world, even when she’s inventing a nastily plausible international movement against the elderly in “Torching the Dusties.” Meanness is never a surprise to this tough-minded writer. “It’s paltry. It’s vicious. It’s normal. It’s what happens in life,” Verna opines in the title story as she prepares, many decades after the fact, to murder the man who got her drunk and pregnant in high school. Anger and resentment don’t fade over the years for Atwood’s characters; they bitterly recall ancient grievances in three linked stories about the fallout from betrayals and humiliations among the denizens of the Riverboat , a long-gone bohemian coffeehouse in Toronto. Perhaps their brooding distracts them from the “long string of indignities” that constitutes old age in these unsentimental tales.

Jorrie, the sexy man-killer who stole the boyfriend of a woman named Constance in “Alphinland,” now “looks like a sequined leather handbag” after the unwise application of too much metallic bronzer in preparation for the funeral in “Dark Lady” of the man who dumped them both. Not that Gavin is doing so well in “Revenant,” the middle story in the trio; he’s mortified to discover that the grad student supposedly there to interview him about his poetry in fact wants to hear about Constance’s fantasy series, which was mocked by the Riverboat crowd back in the ’60s but a half-century later is the subject of serious scholarly respect. As always in Atwood’s work, sardonic humor leavens her dark subject matter, and a few stories conclude (somewhat surprisingly) on a note of gruff tenderness. "Stone Mattress: Nine Tales" by Margaret Atwood. (Nan A. Talese) “Lovely, Dark, Deep” is the longest and most varied of the three collections.

Oates’s stories range from the florid, Gothic tone of “The Hunter,” about a woman oppressed by her dying father and a new lover, to the stark polyphony of “Things Passed on the Way to Oblivion,” the painful saga of an illegitimate daughter desperate to please her dismissive adoptive family. Men are frequently unfaithful, domineering and elusive, while the wives in such stories as “The Disappearing” and “The Jesters” anxiously insist, “We are protected. We are very happy.” But Oates’s women are not as passive as they seem. In the most pointed case, the title story , a young poet interviewing Robert Frost in the summer of 1951 soon drops her deferential manner to ask a series of sharp questions about the crusty old man’s mythologizing narrative of his own life. He stumbles down the porch steps as “the taunting girl-interviewer” vanishes: “He could not call for help, the shame was too deep.” “Life — raw, grasping, blind” is a perennial challenge to Oates’s characters, vulnerable and bemused as they’re buffeted by the vagaries of fate and the whims of people they love.

Even in the privileged university enclaves where several of these stories take place, the working-class understanding conveyed in “Forked River Roadside Shrine, South Jersey” lurks under the surface: Our choices are limited, and we are subject to forces beyond our control. Smith is a writer in New York who frequently reviews books for The Washington Post. THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER By Hilary Mantel

Question: Who is the author of a series of short stories, published in 2014, under the collective title The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher?
Answer: HILARY MANTEL