Name: A Place of Greater Safety (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)
ISBN: 9780008329730

Hilary Mantel

An extraordinary work of historical imagination – this is Hilary Mantel’s epic novel of the French Revolution.

One of the ten books – novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography – that make up the 4th Estate Matchbook Classics’ series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist.

1789: as Revolution sweeps through France, three obscure young men step into the harsh light of history.

Georges Jacques Danton has a prize fighter’s build, a sharp lawyer’s brain, a consuming ambition. Camille Desmoulins, charming and erratic, is a writer of genius with a taste for violence. Maximilien Robespierre is a slight, meek idealist who recoils from power, but who will lead his country into the darkness of the Terror.

For these men, the Revolution is a blood rite: the forces they have helped unleash will remake the world, but destroy their lives. From the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, A Place of Greater Safety announced Hilary Mantel as one of our greatest living novelists.

Reviews of A Place of Greater Safety (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)

- ‘Superbly readable…an assured and strange masterpiece.’ Sunday Telegraph
- ‘One of the best English novels of the 20th century.’ Diana Athill, The Oldie
- ‘Hilary Mantel has soaked herself in the history of the period…and a striking picture emerges of the exhilaration, dynamic energy and stark horror of those fearful days.’ Daily Telegraph
- ‘I cannot think of a historical novel as good as this until one goes back to Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian”, published forty years ago.’ Evening Standard
- ‘Marvellous…It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Hilary Mantel captures it all.’ Time Out
- ‘Intriguing…She has grasped what made these young revolutionaries – and with them the French Revolution – tick.’ Independent
- ‘Crafty tensions, twists and high drama…a bravura display of her endlessly inventive, eerily observant style.’ Times Literary Supplement
- ‘An extraordinary and overwhelming novel…immensely detailed and yet fast-moving…she has set herself to capture the excitement and intellectual fervour of the period. She does it admirably…a tour de force.’ Scotsman
- ‘Riveting…the book overflows with a natural storyteller’s energy.’ New Yorker
- ‘Much, much more than a historical novel, this is an addictive study of power, and the price that must be paid for it…a triumph.’ Cosmopolitan
- ‘This is a high-class historical blockbuster.’ Red Magazine
- ‘Hilary Mantel has pulled off the apparently impossible…an ambitious, gripping epic.’ Vogue