Vacant Possession
Written by Hilary Mantel
Narrated by Sandra Duncan
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Hilary Mantel
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.
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Reviews for Vacant Possession
65 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5At the end of Hilary Mantel?s first novel, ?Every Day is Mother?s Day,? Muriel Axon is sent to a psychiatric institution after a series of unpleasant events that lead to the death of both her infant and her mother Evelyn. ?Vacant Possession? takes place ten years later, and recounts Muriel?s time in the asylum and the period after her release, during which she hatches a complicated scheme to take revenge on the people whom Muriel blames for those deaths. Along the way, she takes on a variety of identities, including that as Lizzie Blank, the housekeeper for the Sidney family, who now live in the house Muriel and Evelyn used to share, and as ?Poor Mrs. Wilmot,? a cleaner at the hospital where Isabel Field?s father is a patient. Isabel, as readers of the first book will remember, is the social-worker assigned to the Axons, who had an affair with Mr. Sidney. In ?Vacant Possession? yet more connections between the Fields, the Axons, and the Sidneys are revealed. Indeed, coincidences run rampant in this book, and the tangled connections between the main characters go on and on. But never mind: the story is gripping and wickedly funny, and once again displays Ms. Mantel?s wonderful skills as an author.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel - very Good
I really shouldn't put off writing down my thoughts on the books I read, it's been almost a month since I read this and I've read another 4 and a half since then. Nevertheless, this one has stuck with me.
Written back in 1986 well before the dizzy heights of Wolf Hall et al, this is a very strange little book. Bleakly, darkly funny and a little disturbing, the story centres around Murial Axon, newly released from an institution and hell bent on destroying those she blames for putting her there.
I'm trying not to put any spoilers in, but the characters we meet have all got more than just Murial in common and the story builds to a final denouement which leaves you wondering about many things.
This settles for me that Hilary Mantel is an author I need to backtrack on.
Definitely more than just a writer of historical fiction. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5At the end of Hilary Mantel’s first novel, “Every Day is Mother’s Day,” Muriel Axon is sent to a psychiatric institution after a series of unpleasant events that lead to the death of both her infant and her mother Evelyn. “Vacant Possession” takes place ten years later, and recounts Muriel’s time in the asylum and the period after her release, during which she hatches a complicated scheme to take revenge on the people whom Muriel blames for those deaths. Along the way, she takes on a variety of identities, including that as Lizzie Blank, the housekeeper for the Sidney family, who now live in the house Muriel and Evelyn used to share, and as “Poor Mrs. Wilmot,” a cleaner at the hospital where Isabel Field’s father is a patient. Isabel, as readers of the first book will remember, is the social-worker assigned to the Axons, who had an affair with Mr. Sidney. In “Vacant Possession” yet more connections between the Fields, the Axons, and the Sidneys are revealed. Indeed, coincidences run rampant in this book, and the tangled connections between the main characters go on and on. But never mind: the story is gripping and wickedly funny, and once again displays Ms. Mantel’s wonderful skills as an author.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Muriel spent ten years locked in a psychiatric ward plotting and planning against those who put her away. Her former social worker, her old neighbors and anyone who had crossed her path seems to be fair game.I had a very hard time getting into this book. I found the characters a bit...flat, and the plot a bit predictable. Overall, I was pretty disappointed with this book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hilary Mantel is such an excellent writer. This one is about a bunch of relatively normal, screwed-up people and their neuroses, alcoholism, psychoses, peccadilloes, etc. Very British.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I enjoyed her book Wolf Hall and i think i've read one other by her that i liked but this one, i didn't really like much. I found it very confusing. It kept jumping around from character to character, most of whom for the longest time didn't seem at all connected. Apparently it's a sequel to another book but I don't think that really made a difference to my confusion. Some of the relevant background got filled in as we went along. The story starts off with a middle aged teacher and his family who are living in an old house that used to be owned by a mother who was a real "mommie dearest" and controlled her adult daughter, Muriel until she died. Muriel has been in an institution for 10 years and is now released. The teacher's daughter is having an affair with a married man, whose wife used to be the teacher's mistress. Muriel, in disguise, got herself hired as a cleaning lady for the teacher's family and she also works nights in a different disguise cleaning in a nursing home type hospital where the teacher's mother is and where the father of the ex-mistress also is, who also happens to be the father of the baby Muriel had when she was younger, (her mother made her kill the infant apparently, this would have been in that first book, i gather). You see how confusing this all is? Anyway, i thought about giving up on it a few times but i stayed with it and was not rewarded with the ending which seemed to leave things hanging. Or maybe it was just me.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I admire HM's skill with the voices of her characters, the things they say to each other, distinctive, strongly flavoured, a good commentary. Read the book eagerly, but it left a bad taste. It couldn't finish well, but neither did it finish badly. It didn't finish at all, I would have preferred if it had.