Learning to Talk

Two-time Booker winner Mantel (Wolf Hall) departs from the broad canvas of Tudor history for a revelatory collection drawing on her childhood in a northern English moorland village. Several center on fraught relationships with parents and stepparents. “You should not judge your parents,” says the narrator, twice, in “Giving up the Ghost.” Mantel quotes Thucydides one moment, Shakespeare the next, or St. Augustine, and high and low fit together comfortably in “Curved Is the Line of Beauty,” in which the narrator remembers seeing the Arthur O’Shaughnessy poem referenced in the title on a jar as a child, which brings solace during a tough time ruled by Catholic guilt and limited means (“we continued to live in one of those houses where there was never any money, and doors were slammed hard”). In “The Clean Slate,” which begins with the narrator working on her family tree with her mother, the narrator reflects memorably on history: “I distrust anecdote. I like to understand history through figures and percentages of these figures, through knowing the price of coal and the price of corn.... I like to be free, so far as I can, from the tyranny of interpretation.” Throughout, the author’s humanity shines through. (June)