Beyond Black

(Paperback, Collins Modern Classics edition)

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Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience classics which will endure for generations to come.
Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of Londons 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 Mantels supremely suspenseful novel is a masterpiece of dark humour and even darker secrets.

Reviews

MagnificentIts one of the greatest ghost stories in the language, but its far more than just a ghost story its 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 loudA 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

Author Bio

Hilary Mantel is the author of fourteen books, including A Place Of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up The Ghost, and the short-story collection The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher. Her two most recent novels, Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies, have both been awarded the Man Booker Prize - an unprecedented achievement.