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    Learning to Talk
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    Learning to Talk
    Unavailable
    Learning to Talk
    Audiobook3 hours

    Learning to Talk

    Written by Hilary Mantel

    Narrated by Anna Bentinck, Jane Collingwood, Multiple Narrators and Patrick Moy

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

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    About this audiobook

    The collection begins 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. 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, dazzled, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.

    With a deceptively light touch, Mantel locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateMar 7, 2013
    ISBN9781471209208
    Unavailable
    Learning to Talk
    Author

    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 Learning to Talk

    4/5

    52 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      Beautifully crafted writing and highly evocative of a time and place which remains in the living memory of some people.
    • 5/5
      Incredible book. She tries to explain in a preface, but I’m still not clear how much of this is fiction and how much memoir. I guess it doesn’t matter much. Astonishingly beautiful and powerful writing about how it feels to be a child and how those feelings are remembered later.

      Here are some quotes from the book that I figured out how to export from the Kindle app. Do you agree with me about the strength of her writing?


      “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me.”


      “When I was very small, small enough to trip every time on the raised curbstone outside the back door, the dog Victor used to take me for a walk. We would proceed at caution across the yard, my hand plunged deep into the ruff of bristly fur at the back of his neck. He was an elderly dog, and the leather of his collar had worn supple and thin. My fingers curled around it, while sunlight struck stone and slate, dandelions opened in the cracks between paving stones, and old ladies aired themselves in doorways, nodding on kitchen chairs and smoothing their skirts over their knees. Somewhere else, in factories, fields and coal mines, England went dully on.”


      “In that one moment it seemed to me that the world was blighted, and that every adult throat bubbled, like a garbage pail in August, with the syrup of rotting lies.”


      “There should be support groups, like a twelve-step program, for young people who hate being young.”

    • 4/5
      Finely told short stories.
    • 3/5
      I liked the writing in this book overall, but I'm not sure I needed to be a part of Mantel's attempt to make sense of her upbringing. Since it was so specific to the United Kingdom, I know I missed a lot, and it did not prompt me to do a lot of research. I am more interested in continuing to read her fiction.
    • 4/5
      Full disclosure: I revere Hilary Mantel. If she never published another word, I would feel like she had done enough. More than enough. I have a fantasy of stalking her to her village, bumping into her on the street, and meekly and politely saying only: "Ms. Mantel, I am in awe of you and your work. Thank you for enriching my life." And walking away. (Hoping, of course, that she would call me back and ask me to tea. Or into the local for a drink.)So of course I loved this. I just love her images, her sentences, the way she thinks. And - as I have said in my review of Giving Up The Ghost - she does better than anyone at portraying the strange blend of keen observation, misinterpretation, unease and resistance that children can feel as they witness what goes on around them. How they - or I suppose I should say she - see and ponder, and make up stories to themselves to make sense of it all as best they can. This book is a sort of accompaniment to Ghost, comprising six stories (which often blend fiction with memoir) and an excerpt from it, all exploring her childhood, memory, youth, and how she fit - or didn't - into the life where fate had dropped her.It is a slight book. I admit that it was likely published because she is Hilary Mantel, and needs no other justification. But I will be reading it again, just to see how a sentence should be written.
    • 5/5
      Learning to Talk: Stories, by Hilary Mantel, is a collection of short stories that are semi-autobiographical and, as one expects from Mantel, very well written.This appears to be a reissue, the original coming out about the same time as her memoir. Thematically it fits better there but is such a strong collection of stories that even without the memoir being fresh in a reader's mind it is worth reading.I can't imagine admitting to not reading many short stories then having the audacity to make a sweeping condemnation of the current state of short story writing, but such is life. There are a lot of good writers writing a lot of good short stories and this, while not brand new, is an example. I also can't imagine thinking it is a compliment to think about offering a writer of Mantel's caliber my castaway story ideas because I don't feel like writing them, but again, arrogance knows no bounds. Needless to say, Mantel comes up with, and has the ability to write, wonderful stories.In addition to readers who enjoy short stories in general I would also recommend this to those who have an interest in the intersection of childhood and (borderline?) dysfunctional households and upbringing.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
    • 3/5
      This short collection of five stories is, sad to say, somewhat lackluster. In fact, the best past of the book was the last section, a preview of Mantel's memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, which I look forward to reading in full. The stories all depict episodes in the lives of children growing up in dreary villages in the north of England in the 1950s. They struggle with class barriers defined by their vowels, names, broken families, and aspirations. Apparently, Mantel was following the mantra of creative writing instructors everywhere: write what you know. She's much better, I think, as a historical novelist. The stories do have their moments of originality and humor, but I found them fairly bleak for the most part.