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An Experiment in Love: The Sunday Times bestselling author's powerful literary historical fiction debut

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An Experiment in Love: The Sunday Times bestselling author's powerful literary historical fiction debut Kindle Edition

Following ‘A Change in Climate’, this brilliant novel from the double Man Booker prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’ is a coming-of-age tale set in Seventies London.

It is London, 1970. Carmel McBain, in her first term at university, has cut free of her childhood roots in the north. Among the gossiping, flirtatious girls of Tonbridge Hall, she begins her experiments in life and love. But the year turns. The mini-skirt falls out of style and an era of concealment begins. Carmel’s world darkens, and tragedy waits in the wings.

Print length 258 pages
Language English
Publisher Fourth Estate
Publication date May 6, 2010
File size 1318 KB
Page Flip Enabled
Word Wise Enabled
Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review, from publishers weekly, from library journal, from booklist, from kirkus reviews, from the back cover, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., an experiment in love, from audiofile, product details.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003LSSDX4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fourth Estate (May 6, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 6, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1318 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 258 pages
#1,904 in Literary Sagas
#3,387 in Psychological Literary Fiction
#8,482 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)

About the author

Hilary mantel.

Hilary Mantel is one of Britain’s most accomplished, acclaimed and garlanded writers. She is the author of fifteen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have both been awarded The Man Booker Prize. The conclusion to The Wolf Hall Trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was published in 2020.

Customer reviews

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Customers find the writing style wonderful and powerful. They describe the idea as interesting, original, and genius. Readers also say the book is a good time well spent and satisfying. However, some find the storyline dull and sparse.

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Customers find the writing style wonderful, powerful, and well-executed. They also say the story is interesting.

"This blew me away! It is wonderfully written -- a carefully observed tale of growing up in an impoverished and repressive world, a vivid portrait..." Read more

"...The individual characters were well drawn and I really like Mantel's writing style ...." Read more

"It's obviously the work of a fantastic author early in her career. It reads well and really is interesting given what we now know about Hilary Mantel..." Read more

"An interesting idea, and well executed . Mantel's use of language, particularly dialog, is very satisfying." Read more

Customers find the idea interesting, original, and well-executed. They also say it's a good book.

"Hilary Mantel my new favorite writer, far above most others. True genius ." Read more

" An interesting idea , and well executed. Mantel's use of language, particularly dialog, is very satisfying." Read more

" Highly original and not sentimental." Read more

" Good book , annoying ending..." Read more

Customers find the book well worth reading, satisfying, and interesting.

"...It reads well and really is interesting given what we now know about Hilary Mantel's ability to develop characters such as Thomas Cromwell." Read more

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"...For me time spent reading her books is time well spent ." Read more

Customers find the storyline dull, melodramatic, and sparse. They also say the ending is a non-sequitur.

"...This novel seemed sparse and rather flat...." Read more

"Well written story of a time and place. Story line can be dull . But expectations were very high coming from the same author as wolf hall" Read more

"...out enough to understand what motivates them and the ending is a melodramatic non-sequitor ." Read more

"Good book, annoying ending ..." Read more

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AN EXPERIMENT IN LOVE

by Hilary Mantel ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1996

An angry novel by Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety, 1993, etc.), offers a powerful, but incomplete, portrait of a young woman driving herself toward destruction. Narrator Carmel McBain traces her crabbed, anxious life from childhood in Lancashire up to college in London in the 1960's. Her parents are Irish immigrants, her father affable and distant, her mother furious, accusatory, manipulative. She relentlessly prods her daughter to succeed, and Carmel, intelligent and pliable, does: She wins a place in a posh convent school and eventually a scholarship to London. Meanwhile, Katrina, the stolid, bright, cruel daughter of a neighbor, shadows Carmel's life, always competing with her, following her first to the convent school and then to London. And Julia, Carmel's friend and roommate at the university, is elegant, insouciant, at 18 already juggling a series of well-heeled boyfriends. Mantel's portrait of these girls, and more generally of the lives of young women in the unsettled `60's, is sharp and convincing: Their brittle, witty talk, their struggle to fight for true careers, their difficulty navigating a new world of sexual possibilities, are all rendered here in vivid detail. And the self-hating Carmel's quiet descent into anorexia is traced with almost clinical exactitude. There's a much-foreshadowed climactic scene in which Carmel's dormitory burns down and Lysette, Katrina's roommate, dies. (Carmel suspects that the ever-envious and angry Katrina locked her in their room before fleeing.) Then, rather bafflingly, there's a perfunctory final chapter in which a much- older Carmel, cured of her anorexia and married, looks back on these events. We never learn how she came to grips with her furies, though, or even what has happened to the loathsome Katrina. It may be that Mantel wants to suggest that such things don't matter because so little has changed: Women are still without much true authority. Still, without some conclusive image, we're left guessing about the greater meanings behind this grim, profoundly moving work.

Pub Date: May 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-8050-4427-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

LITERARY FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Hilary Mantel ; edited by Nicholas Pearson

by Hilary Mantel

More About This Book

IN THE NEWS

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel

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B : well-written though dispiriting

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Consensus : Generally enthusiastic, though a sense of wariness in many of the reviews. Most find it both bleak and funny. From the Reviews : "Mantel's account of Carmel's journey from Lancashire childhood to anorexic collapse on the stairs of Tonbridge Hall is immaculate in its pace, its sinewy humour and vitality. (...) Hilary Mantel is a wonderfully unsurprised dissector of human motivation, and in An Experiment in Love she has written a bleak tale seamed with crackling wit." - Helen Dunmore, The Guardian "Mantel is such a strong observer of behaviour and such a capable stringer of incident that her lack of originality doesn't matter much." - Philip Hensher, The Guardian "Mantel writes from anger: at poverty, at the class system, at the social and economic forces bearing down on women who tried to struggle up from below in Britain in the late '60s. Carmel's voice is powerful, but it is also unrelenting. The characters and incidents she relates, though varied and acutely portrayed, blur through a scrim of misery. She does not so much convey the awful Karina--villain and in some way victim--as denounce her. Her story lacks the light we need to see the darkness." - Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times "Hilary Mantel is justly compared to Muriel Spark as a satirist; this cunning plot with its hidden agenda of violence and betrayal has something in common with Spark's elegant parables." - Judy Cooke, New Statesman & Society "(Mantel) specializes in shock effects, especially aftershock, which is what her book ghoulishly delivers. Her approach is slow and stealthy; the hair on the back of the neck rises, not all of a sudden, but gradually. The effect depends, of course, on the incongruity between the ordinariness of Carmel's progress, and the horrors it skirts." - Gabriele Annan, The New York Review of Books "If there's any complaint, it's that we want to know more; like Carmel herself, the book could have been a little fatter. What happened to Karina and Carmel after the horrifying denouement? But perhaps that's the point: it's what you'll never know that haunts you; and with all its brilliance, its sharpness and its clear-eyed wit, An Experiment in Love is a haunting book." - Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review "The novel, though expert, is unsettling. It is unsettling through its lack of affect, though this is also its strength. (...) A clear-eyed examination of female alliances may well be needed in these misleading times. An Experiment in Love may well be such an examination, cool, unsentimental, and unassumingly authoritative." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator "A blend of satire and elusive fable worked beautifully for Mantel in Fludd , but this time the mix feels wrong. Perhaps didacticism is to blame." - Julia O'Faolain, Times Literary Supplement Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

An Experiment in Love is a novel of coming of age, of reaching adulthood. The narrator is Carmel McBain, who looks back on her youth and specifically her university days (around 1970). She comes from a relatively poor background, her parents working class and, though living in England, of Irish-Catholic stock. Academic success allows Carmel to free herself from this world, at least in some respects. Carmel escapes provincial Lancashire when her exam results are good enough to get her a university spot in London. Two of her classmates from her previous school, the Holy Redeemer, are also there: Karina, with her unpronounceable East European last name, and Julianne (later Julia) Lipcott. Among the first choices Carmel must make at the residence at the university is which of the two she is to share a room with. Carmel moves the story back and forth between the student days in London and what preceded it -- at the convent school, and in her childhood -- as well as briefly touching upon the present, years after these events. Carmel's poverty and class background play a big role in defining her, especially at the convent school and also later at university. She is drawn to the world Julianne, the doctor's daughter, inhabits (the book begins with the memories set off by seeing Julia(nne)'s picture in the newspaper), but knows she has much in common with poor Karina as well. At the residence hall she chooses to share a room with Julianne. Karina lives nearby, with Lynette -- a girl with all the qualities Carmel admires. There are the usual events that one might expect in any university women's residence: some academic stuff, problems with love and sex (including a pregnancy). The friendship between Carmel, Julianne, and Karina is what is most significant. It can hardly be described as friendship: they don't seem to like each other all that much, but they do take care of and look out for each other, feeling some sort of bond. It is one that is easily broken, as they eventually easily drift apart in their separate lives. The experiment in love of the title is not the usual amorous one or ones, focussing instead on friendship and mutual support. They experiment but youth and fear and insecurity doom them to failure. "It would be nice if we went about and talked like an Edna O'Brien novel," Julianne says. "It would suit us." But they don't -- they talk like a Mantel novel, a darker, sadder thing. Food plays an important role -- perhaps too simple a device, as employed by Mantel here. Karina grows progressively fatter and fatter, while Carmel first watches what she eats because she has so little money and then starves herself in an anorexic fit after she breaks up with her boyfriend. Julia(nne), studying medicine, will go on to become a specialist in anorexia. The book also takes a dark turn with its end, when a fire breaks out in the residence. The turn is very dark indeed, a fairly shocking conclusion. At the end Carmel can write about these formative years that "that is where we went wrong". Not your usual happy end, all the characters are marked by their complex and ultimately unsatisfactory relationships with each other. This is not a case of young women finding strength together -- far from it. Tellingly it is the most rounded figure, Lynette, that finally suffers most. Mantel writes well, but it is not the most pleasant of tales she tells. A nicely constructed book, with many of the usual fine Mantel brushstrokes (capturing so much with what seems to be so little effort), An Experiment in Love is a very fine book. But not a happy one.

About the Author :