Learning to Talk: Short stories

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Hilary Mantel. Learning to Talk: Short stories

Learning to Talk. Short Stories. Hilary Mantel

Copyright

Dedication

Table of Contents

King Billy Is A Gentleman

Destroyed

Curved Is The Line Of Beauty

Learning To Talk

Third Floor Rising

The Clean Slate

Giving Up The Ghost

Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I. Across the Narrow Sea Putney, 1500

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About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

Once again with love

to Anne Terese:

.....

It was only later, when I left home, that I understood the blithe carelessness of the average life – how freely people speak, how freely they live. There are no secrets in their lives, there is no poison at the root. People I met had an innocence, an openness, that was quite foreign to my own nature; or if once it had been native to me, then I had lost it long ago in the evening fogs, in the four o’clock darks, abandoned it in the gardens between the straggling fences and tussocks of grass.

I became a lawyer; one must live, as they say. The whole decade of the sixties went by, and my childhood seemed to belong to some much earlier, greyer world. It was my inner country, visited sometimes in dreams that shadowed my day. The troubles in Northern Ireland began, and my family fell to quarrelling about them, and the newspapers were full of pictures of burned-out shopkeepers, with faces like ours.

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