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A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel - digital resources

The magnificent final book from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. ‘Ink is a generative fluid,’ she explains. ‘If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.’ A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

Praise for Hilary Mantel:

‘A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature’ Margaret Atwood

‘One of the very greatest of our writers; poetic and profound prose with an incomparable feel for the texture of history’ Simon Schama

‘Mantel bristled with intelligence, looked at everything, saw everything… With the uneasy energy of her early life, Mantel made rigorous and unsettling work about history, the body and the unknowable’ Anne Enright

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Radio 2 Book Club - Winter titles

The Winter season of the Radio 2 Book Club is out now, with brilliant brand-new fiction titles to discover. The BBC Radio 2 Book Club is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. It features a wide range of titles and authors, recommending great reads from both new and much-loved writers, encouraging listeners to perhaps try out a genre they might not have read before, and share their opinions and insights on the titles and great reads they’re enjoying right now.

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How to start a reading group

Interested in joining a reading group or starting one of your own? Download our quick guide to getting started. You can also download icebreaker questions to help get your discussion started, and a social media guide to show how you can share your reading with others online.

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Discussion guides

We know how useful a discussion guide is for your book club meeting, so here you’ll find some recent guides provided by publishers. Free to download, you can use them to help choose your next book and guide your discussion.

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