'The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone'

Beyond Black Paperback

Beyond Black

Hilary Mantel

A comically sinister tale of wicked spirits and suburban mediums from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodiesand The Mirror & the Light.

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…

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Hilary Mantel’s supremely suspenseful novel is a masterpiece of dark humour and even darker secrets.

Reviews of Beyond Black

    • ‘Magnificent…It’s one of the greatest ghost stories in the language, but it’s far more than just a ghost story – it’s a novel of desperate truthfulness – a majestic work, truly.’ Philip Pullman
    • ‘Sparkling, sinister and supremely original.’ Sunday Telegraph
    • ‘As black as a tar barrel and very, very funny.’ The Times
    • ‘Laceratingly observant, a masterpiece of wit, heavy with atmosphere. It is also gloriously insolent and slyly funny: full of robust, uncluttered prose and searing moments.’ Independent
    • ‘Pins elusive Middle England to the page in all its creepiness: a place blank and disconnected, yet fatally self-absorbed.’ Rachel Cooke, Observer
    • ‘An elegant, atmospheric tale and a nuanced portrait, full of ironies.’ Tatler
    • ‘Chilling, creepy and endlessly inventive.’ Kate Saunders, The Times
    • ‘Hilary Mantel has done something extraordinary. She has taken the ethereal halfway house between heaven and hell, between the living and the dead, and nailed it on the page.’ Fay Weldon, Guardian
    • ‘Has the kind of gallows humour that makes you laugh out loud…A real page-turner, a darkly humorous take on the enduring effects of childhood trauma.’ Mslexia
    • ‘A deep, disturbing, violently amusing and subversive work.’ Daily Telegraph

More from Hilary Mantel