Beyond Black Hilary Mantel by Hilary Mantel 9781554688975, 9781443404549, 1554688973, 1443404543, B003GRJPNW instant download after payment.

Hilary Mantel’s comically sinister tale of wicked spirits and suburban mediums is a masterpiece of dark humour - and even darker secrets.

Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London’s orbital ring road with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, passing on messages from beloved dead ancestors. But behind her plump, smiling persona hides a desperate woman: she knows the terrors the next life holds but must conceal them from her wide-eyed clients. At the same time she is plagued by spirits from her own past, who infiltrate her body and home, becoming stronger and nastier the more she resists…

"Ghost stories, especially ones that come in the tasteful wrapping of the literary novel, often seem haunted far more by metaphor than the supernatural. The ghosts aren’t mere ghosts; they’re symbols representing some repressed aspect of the protagonist — her dark desires, his secret crimes. So there’s something refreshing about the initial lack of ambiguity of the ghosts in Hilary Mantel’s new novel, Beyond Black: These aren’t psychic conceits, but otherworldly, fiendish, Scooby-Doo–style ghouls... Mantel — a funny, scathing British novelist, too long ignored in the U.S. — is a master of dark subject matter... but Mantel’s brand of morality has a kind of vicious glee to it. She gives us a story of evil overcome and wounds healed, but she also scares the pants off us."  -  Claire Dederer, New York Magazine

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Man Booker Prize, A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O'Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.