Vacant Possession - by Hilary Mantel (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: London: Chatto & Windus, c1986.

Book Synopsis

Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon was locked away for society's protection, but psychiatric confinement has only increased her malice and ingenuity. At last free, she sets into motion an intricate plan to exact revenge on those who had her put away. Her former social worker, Isabel, and her old neighbors have moved on, but Muriel, with her talent for disguise, will infiltrate their homes and manipulate their lives, until all her enemies are brought together for a gruesome finale. Hilary Mantel's razor-sharp wit animates every page of this darkly comic tale of retribution.

Review Quotes

"Mantel is a master storyteller, and here she's just having a wickedly good time." --San Francisco Chronicle

"It would be hard to over emphasize the mean pleasure to be found in Vacant Possession." --Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times

"Mantel imbues her writing with a unique combination of exhileration and dread. . . . She shows us how fiction can lift us into the extraordinary." --Meg Wolitzer, The Washington Post Book World

"Savage and funny black humour at its best." --Observer (London)

"Hilary Mantel's wit is wonderfully and startlingly nasty." --Sunday Times (London)

"Filled with fiish glee . . . Lie back and laugh yourself silly: this is the best s-up for a long, long time." --New Statesman

About the Author

Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.