English | ASIN: B09GCTBD3S | June 21, 2022 | 3 hrs and 37 mins | [email protected] kbps | 100 MBBy: Hilary MantelNarrated by: Anna Bentinck, Jane Collingwood, Patrick Moy

"The multiple performances in this audiobook are uniformly adept, providing listeners the disag experience of adults unflinchingly looking back at childhood." -AudioFile on Learning to Talk

Learning to Talk is a dazzling collection of short stories from the two- winner of the Man Booker Prize and #1 New York s bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy.

With a new foreword by Hilary Mantel.

In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transfog moments of a haunted childhood.

Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories b in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In “King Billy Is A Gentleman,” the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. “Curved Is the Line of Beauty" is a story of friendship, faith, and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In “Third Floor Rising," she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.

With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed.

“A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.” —USA Today

“Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.” —The Washington Post

Categories: Fiction Short Stories