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The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories
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The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories

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The New York Times
bestselling collection, from the Man Booker prize-winner for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, that has been called "scintillating" (New York Times Books Review), "breathtaking" (NPR), "exquisite" (The Chicago Tribune) and "otherworldly" (Washington Post).

"A new Hilary Mantel book is an Event with a ‘capital ‘E.'"—NPR

"A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat."—USA Today (4 stars)

"[Mantel is at] the top of her game."—Salon

"Genius."—The Seattle Times

One of the most accomplished, acclaimed, and garlanded writers, Hilary Mantel delivers a brilliant collection of contemporary stories

In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel's trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display.

Stories of dislocation and family fracture, of whimsical infidelities and sudden deaths with sinister causes, brilliantly unsettle the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way.
Cutting to the core of human experience, Mantel brutally and acutely writes about marriage, class, family, and sex. Unpredictable, diverse, and sometimes shocking, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 30, 2014
ISBN9781627792110
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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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Short stories, realistic fiction.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Sorry To Disturb: **** Reminded me a lot of one of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads - Bed among the lentils. Felt like a real experience of a real woman and a glimpse of another world. Tells so much by what is left out.
    Comma: *** and a half. Pretty disturbing.
    The Long QT: **
    Winter Break: ***
    Harley Street: ** Didn't work for me.
    Offences Against the Person: ***
    How Shall I Know You: ***
    The Heart Fails Without Warning: **** Very sad.
    Terminus: ***
    The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: ***** Brilliant short story. Every page twisting away from expectations and stereotypes, but every word persuading us as soon as it happens.

    I started slowly but then read most of the stories end to end - and they came across as pretty disturbing. Shall re-read a few.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5

    This is my first Mantel. I’ve been postponing reading the first two volumes of the Cromwell trilogy, waiting for the third volume to come out predictably in 2016. One does not tackle a twice-awarded-writer-with-the-Man-Booker-Prize without having everything in one big bundle to make a proper assessment...Nevertheless here goes my first take on Hilary Mantel, for what it’s worth.

    One of my favourite things in life is reading that truly astounding book at the right juncture in time, ie, a book that mysteriously echoes and enriches my current thoughts. I think this was one of those (imperfect/perfect) books. There is a peculiar comfort in reading a book whose structures and operations mimic what, I think, literature should be all about. One of the things I like the most about literature is to read it and later on write about it. Literature for me is all about a set of interlocking conventions (a system), and how we can read this so-called system into something meaningful.

    You can find the rest of this review on my blog.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a wide ranging set of short stories by the twice Booker Award winning Hillary Mantel. This is quite tough going. The character descriptions are sharp and modern. Ideals and morals are things from the past.The variety of voices and settings is dazzling. Her choice of words is precise."I closed the hall door discretely, and melted into the oppressive hush. The air conditioner rattled away, like an old relative with a loose cough." For some reason this reminded me of James Agee's Death in the Family.The stories make for some unsettling reading. I would guess that Alfred Hitchcock would enjoy and understand.Now, I need to take a breath and take on her Cromwell novels yet this year. I expect that it may be difficult to track so many historical characters. It is difficult to imagine the writer of these stories being the same person of the acclaimed historical novels. I just don't feel at the ready for these.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Superb writing in compelling bites.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Nine stories about present-day British people, none of which are endearing because of their characters but are readable because of Mantel's brilliant writing. Perhaps they lose something in translation to an American culture. I only wish Mantel had a more generous opinion of her fellow creatures.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Short stories as one expects them to be: unusual anecdotes of weird topics, simple to read but of heavy substance. most are in first person but you never get to know the narrators. Many involve death. I liked The Long QT perhaps because there is a character with my name and because it ends unexpectedly. The latter is true of Winter Break, too.
    Where do some of these story ideas originate?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I received this from early reviewers. Hilary Mantel's skill with language and in painting a picture is superb. I thoroughly enjoyed every word. Reading her modern short stories has strengthened my resolve to read the Cromwell series.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Hilary Mantel could even make the reading of Old Testament genealogies an un-put-downable pleasure. The short story is not my favourite read, but every one of these is a gem.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I am a great fan of short fiction, but have not till now been a great fan of Ms. Mantel's writing so approached the collection with some skepticism. And while a couple of the stories in this pared down advance copy felt misplaced here (especially the maudlin "The Long QT", on the whole i found it a very satisfying read. My favorite was the first in this group, "Sorry to Disturb" -- for me it created a great sense of place, mood, and tension perfect for this form. Recommend.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    In the reverse of the reviewer below, I am a great fan of Hilary Mantel but do not like short stories. I thought I might like this book of stories by one of my favourite writers but unfortunately although the writing was marvellous I could not get enjoyment from them. To me she does a wonderful job of building the suspense only to have the story finish abruptly with no questions answered. I found the last story from which the book gets its title to be only half a story, one which the reader must complete oneself and therefore quite unsatisfactory. And incidentally the idea of giving the book its title from this story creates a very false impression of what the book is about, this to me is "a big con"
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When this book was published, I initially resented anything that was keeping Hilary Mantel from publishing her third novel about Thomas Cromwell. But I finally gave in and read this collection of eleven short stories, and found that this form, too, is something Mantel does very well. Dark, startling and unsettling, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher includes several gems.In the opening story, Sorry to Disturb, a British woman living in Saudi Arabia is visited by a Pakistani man. His repeated visits become a problem, and she and can't get rid of him. Mantel spent several years in Saudi Arabia herself, and clearly drew on the experience for the themes in this story.In The Long QT, a woman hosting a party discovers her husband embracing another woman. Told from the husband's point of view, Mantel quickly portrays the hostess as just a little bit OCD, and not fully present with her guests:Picking up glasses, she would push through groups of her own guests, guests who were laughing and passing mobile phones to each other, guests who were, for Christ’s sake, trying to relax and enjoy the evening. People would oblige her by knocking back what was in their glass and handing it over. If not she would say, “Excuse me, have you finished with that?” Sometimes they made little stacks of tumblers for her, helpfully, and said, “Here you go, Jodie.” They smiled at her indulgently, knowing they were helping her out with her hobby. In How Shall I Know You?, the reader is part of an author's inner monologue when she appears at book events. I loved this bit about making commitments: When the day came, I wondered why I’d agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or something else diverting. Winter Break is the most vivid and disturbing story in the collection. A couple on holiday travels by taxi to their resort. An incident occurs en route, and the couple remains in the car while the driver handles the situation. A surprising dark ending revealed what really happened, and sent shivers down my spine.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I began reading Hilary Mantel’s recent collection of short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, with high expectations after loving her historical novels, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. These stories are far removed from the court intrigues of the 16th century. Most are set in bleak and trapped surroundings in 20th century England: dingy hotel rooms with brown, stained carpets; walk-up flats; middle class homes; and anonymous train stations. The narrators and those they observe seem trapped in a crabbed and jaundiced world, riven with pent-up want, isolation,and mundane misery. These are people whose ability to connect with others--whether family, friend or coworker--falls painfully short. Yet there are unexpected gestures of intimacy, for example when a daughter wordlessly attempts to repair a shattered dish, a symbol of her parents’ broken marriage. Or when a sister leaves small packets of foil-wrapped food for her hopelessly anorexic sibling. At times, these stories reminded me of Victorian ghost tales such as those penned by the wonderful Sheridan Le Fanu. Stories with a tinge of the supernatural and the awful. Stories with a twist at the end, that causes a sudden chill of recognition. The imprint of these stories is sharp, like the "blade of bone" that indents the palm of one of Mantel's characters: "When she had woken up next morning, the shape of it was still there in her mind."(189) Just so, the shape of these unsettling stories will remain with the reader.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It annoys me when I don’t like something but don’t know why. In the case of this short story collection by Hillary Mantel, I can’t come up with much of anything to complain about, but I also don’t have much to praise. I suppose that’s what people mean when they say a book was a meh read.But meh doesn’t seem quite right. I liked some of the stories quite a bit. In fact, I liked some of them enough that I wanted more. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the short story from wasn’t enough for these stories, so they felt incomplete, like there was more story to tell.That wasn’t the case with the opening story, “Sorry to Disturb,” which involves an English woman in Saudi Arabia entertaining an unwanted guest again and again. It plays with expectations of gender and culture and how those expectations make it difficult to say what we really want to say.The antepenultimate story “The Heart Fails Without Warning” is another nearly complete gem. In it, a girl watches her older sister starving herself to death as her family tries to decide what to do. In the story, anorexia is about disappearing, wasting away, and becoming less than human, dying. There’s enough in the story to dig into, and the reveal near the end left me pondering what the full story was.The title story has gotten a lot of attention for its sensationalistic premise, and I enjoyed it well enough, but I didn’t find much meat there. There’s no massive drama, just the internal murmurings of the narrator trying to figure herself out as she deals with the situation. Maybe that’s the point; that the big choices don’t always involve a big noise. Many of the stories featured people learning something or seeing something they shouldn’t (or don’t want to). Mantel’s writing at the word and sentence level is excellent, as I’d expect, but I’m given no particular reason to care about these people or their situations. A couple of the stories end in twists that sent pleasant chills down my spine, but until those twists, I found them kind of dull.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Where I got the book: my local library.Ah, the slender volume of literary short stories! Such things have become a rarity in traditional publishing, but when the author is a double Man Booker winner there’s justification for padding them out with plenty of white space and title pages, choosing the most provocative title for the volume and putting a heavy advertising budget behind it. From the back matter I can see they were first published in journals and/or “best of” short story collections. I haven’t read one of those for decades—I find that my tolerance for the consciously literary has waned, and that now I prefer a more commercial style of fiction written to literary standards.Thus we have a brief collection of Hilary Mantel short stories, written, I suspect, at various times of her life. They are mostly written in the first person. There are themes—chronic illness, childlessness, sterile marriages, death—that might or might not have an autobiographical origin. They range from the poignant (Comma) to the faintly humorous (The Long QT) to the darkly tragic (The Heart Fails Without Warning) to the puzzling (Terminus).I liked How Shall I Know You best, I think, because of the unexpected bite of its ending, and the fact that it’s based on a slice of life of an obscure writer, forced to give talks at even more obscure literary societies. It’s a reminder that Hilary Mantel did her time before encountering success. I bet they put her up in decent hotels now.I thought the title story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, was the weakest, which is a shame since it closes the book. All of the stories are English in the extreme—what do American readers make of them, I wonder?Anyhow, I enjoyed the stories as a whole, and felt refreshed and oddly youthened by a read of the kind I’ve barely experienced since my late 20s. Compared to the way I felt about the two Cromwell books and, especially, A Place of Greater Safety, this volume was a sandwich compared to a banquet, but Mantel is an author whose work I definitely want to pursue.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A solidly unsentimental collection full of insight and dark humour. I was particularly impressed by the new story added for this paperback edition, The School of English, which is a devastating inditement of the injustices of London society from the perspective of a downtrodden and defenceless Filipina maidservant. That this is placed immediately before the title story adds weight to Mantel's less than complementary views on the Thatcher legacy. Not a long book, and very different to the historical novels, but well worth reading.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is a collection of fairly bland and forgettable short stories. The danger with short story collections is that sometimes an author will become too enamored with the freedom of the medium that they enjoy the experimentation with character study and themes, but forget to include a story. That was too often the case here.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a collection of short stories, most of which had been published elsewhere previously. Some, like Winter Break, reminded me of the work of Rachel Ingalls, whom I adore. Others seemed more like characters sketches than fully formed stories. The title story was embargoed from the advance reading copy I had, so I cannot comment on that one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My only acquaintance with Hilary Mantel until now has been via her two wonderful, Booker-winning books, "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies." While waiting for the final volume in the Cromwell trilogy, why not dip into her un-Tudor oeuvre and see what else she can do? The ten stories in "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher" present a good opportunity. Most were written and published over the last five years, one back in the '90s. The title story is the most recent and was embargoed before publication date and therefore omitted from the ARC. Thankfully, "The New York Times Book Review" printed the story in its entirety so we early readers got the full Mantel.And it turns out she can do quite a lot, especially in the longer stories, several of which leave a lasting impression, often of unease and foreboding. In the opening story, "Sorry to Disturb," which seems clearly autobiographical, an ex-pat woman chafing against the constraints of her life in Saudi Arabia opens her door to a Pakistani man in distress and becomes subject to his increasingly intrusive attentions as we wonder what is real. The story ends with one of Mantel's signature uses of language that startles and delights:“I can never be certain that doors will stay closed and on their hinges, and I do not know, when I turn out the lights at night, whether the house is quiet as I left it or the furniture is frolicking in the dark.”Frolicking furniture? Really? Jarring but perfect. "Comma" is perhaps my favorite in this collection, beautifully evoking a hot summer and two mis-matched children frightened and exhilarated by what they might see spying on a neighbor. "How Shall I Know You?" is a creepily comic tale of an author's dutiful trekking to book clubs in the hinterlands. And in the marvelous title story, a woman contributes commentary on the petty and political failings of the prime minister her uninvited guest is preparing to assassinate. Mantel's stories are dark, funny, surprising, insightful and beautifully crafted. What more would I want?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “I am willing, though, to tear up the timetable and take some new routes; and I know I shall find, at some unlikely terminus, a hand that is meant to rest in mine.”The bad news is, I had not read Mantel, before reading this collection. The good news is, it is a terrific set of ten stories, making this an ideal introduction. The first story and the last one, (the title story) are perfect bookends, featuring unwanted guests, but the results are shockingly and wickedly different. Mantel has a nice range here, with one story about an expat wife, stuck in Saudi Arabia. There is one dealing with a road-weary author on a book tour and another about a young anorexic girl, slowly wasting away. The title story, my personal favorite, about a plumber who shows up at an apartment, on a sinister mission, involving the infamous British PM.I was surprised at how dark and edgy these stories were. She is also a smart and intuitive writer. Now, I better get busy reading her earlier work.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Review #4 — The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and Other Stories by Hillary MantelMantel, twice winner of the Booker Prize, presents here a collection of ten short stories, written between 1993 and 2014, all previously published elsewhere.With such acclaim, I must admit that I bought this book because of its title. I'm sure her Booker-novels are seated proudly on the shelves in every home. Mine are sadly on the TBR-list.Though Mantel's prose is brilliant and her attention to detail vivid, I'm afraid that this collection will not be everyone's cup of tea.I was left with a dark, disturbing and uncomfortable feeling. A feeling I couldn’t shake off only because I didn't want to deal with the tarnished image of reality. I seldom read fiction and those I do, I re-read; this I will not. This is a one-time experience that every reader or aspiring writer should experience only for her literary mastery.First collectively published in 2014 by Fourth State. - IRONJAW'S BOOK REVIEW, Review #4. December 30th 2014.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very good collection, although the weakest was the title story, where the characters and the plot lacked depth.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This collection was rather disappointing. The book had the feel of something thrown together by the publisher to cash in on the popularity of the Cromwell series while book 3 is in progress. The book is pumped up like a teenager's tissue-stuffed bra. The margins are so wide that each page is perhaps 2/3 of the length of a normal page, The font is large enough to see from space, and several blank or nearly blank pages precede each story. Without this trickery this volume would be at most 100 pages. Add to that the fact that all but one story (the title story, which was excellent) had been published before, There were 3 stories I thought excellent, but the rest were just fair to good and there was no cohesion, no stylistic or content flow. There were many times Mantel's erudition and wit were displayed to great advantage but none of this was among her greatest issue. I feel like I have been had for around $25.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Mantel, eerily observant and wickedly funny, is a strange combination of self-conscious fear and lashing wit. Faced with her precision, I am reduced to the inarticulate: a laugh, a sigh, a whispered outbreath, G’ol.

    Sometimes she uses just a word, an adjective or a verb, that brings a smile, a wince, a world to life: “At six, the steeple-headed Saleem had lost his baby fat, and his movements were tentative, as if his limbs were snappable.”

    The story “How Shall I Know You?” speaks directly to my fears. An author is persuaded to speak to a book group outside of London and it is a loathsome destination: her lodging “was not precisely as the photograph had suggested. Set back from the road, it seemed to grow out of a parking lot, a jumble of vehicles double-parked and crowding to the edge of the sidewalk.” The smell of the place had a “travelers’ stench…tar of ten thousand cigarettes, fat of ten thousand breakfasts, the leaking metal seep of a thousand saving cuts” recalling her struggle with a biography about a man who accidentally cut his throat while shaving. The author recalls an earlier, presumably more luxurious accommodation: ”In Madrid, by contrast, my publishers had put me in a hotel suite that consisted of four small dark paneled rooms. They had sent me an opulent, unwieldy, scented bouquet, great wheels of flowers with woody stems. The concierge brought me heavy vases of a grayish glass, slippery in my hands, and I edged them freighted with blooms onto every polished surface; I stumbled from room to room, coffinned against the brown paneling, forlorn, strange, under a pall of pollen, like a person trying to break out of her own funeral.” The story speaks to my fears because I am struck with terror when someone suggests actually meeting an author, or asking them a question. Haven't they already told us what they wanted to say? What on earth could I possibly ask? Good lord, and what, wither under that funny, devastating, vampiric wit, that x-ray vision?

    This is a slim collection, beautifully printed with vast spacing and acres of white. There is room for your mind to wander to what she might have said but did not. Mantel uses words in a way that has no precedent. Her vision is unique. She doesn’t need as many words as others often do to convey her devilish vision. You would have thought, if you’d tried to read her award-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell, that she could not write only a little, but you’d be wrong. She can, and she does, here. These are perfect little gems that speak to her (and our) deepest fears, the deepest held secrets of the heart.


  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm in total agreement with my friend Gayla—very few of the stories feel like anything complete or well worked out. I was trying to figure out what it is that makes an artist's sketchbook so interesting, but a writer's fragments or juvenilia or something like this just not all that appealing. I guess it's just more of a case of visual art being iterative, but text-based arts—writing, drama, film—are really about the finished product, and it's not really all that much fun to look at an entire collection of out-takes. There were a few good pieces—the title story was well done, and the first one in the galley, "Sorry to Disturb." "Comma" wasn't bad, although it kind of suffered from New Yorker-story syndrome, almost all interior and I'm not sure that's enough to carry it. And I do love her writing, so precise. But otherwise, eh... it's a sketchbook.Also, U.S. audiences who aren't familiar with the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, which is much more well-known in the UK, are going to miss the entire point of one of the stories (not going to say which one because that would amount to a spoiler).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Vivid descriptions, wonderful writing and amazing characterizations, make this one of my favorite book of short stories for this year. All are good but there is one that sticks in my mind, the ending kind of socked me in the face, had to go back and re-read to see if I read it right the first time.Then went and re-read the whole story to see if any clues were given along the way. The first time the ending kind of snuck up on me, I just love authors that can do that. Anyway, not going to tell you the name of the story because that would give an unfair advantage, if you know it is coming it is not as surprising.Anyway a group of stories definitely worth reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Hilary Mantel wrote 2 great books about Thomas Cromwell that won the Booker Prizes and were excellent. I read them both and rated them very highly. This book consists of short stories some of which were previously published. Overall I enjoyed the stories. The writing is excellent but the subject matter didn't totally engage me. However, I thought the entire book was worth the last story which is the Title story. Very creative and very good. Had the whole book been at this level it would have been a 5. I do think that although an interesting work, this book is no where close to level of her Cromwell books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There is a good variety of stories presented in this short book. They are so original and so creative; they are a joy to contemplate. Finally, an author has provided something to read that is not the same-old, same-old variation of a tired idea, not something that feels like it has been hastily written to meet a deadline or written simply for television or a future movie. Each story is unique and different in its development of some common themes.One story tackles a clash of cultures in a Middle Eastern country, another challenges the behavior of children and possibly even how the sins of some are visited upon them as adults, another tale intimates that there are alternate lifestyles, others insinuate the existence of magic or the supernatural, another exposes infidelity as its theme, still another offers up how disabilities are actually viewed differently in the eyes of each beholder, and the final piece exposes the radical effects of political conflicts in a story about “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”. Each story explores the psychology behind the behavior of the characters. The idea that “what goes around comes around” kept returning to me as I read. In one instance it involved a $20 tip, in another, the love of a child, and in a third, the allusion to one’s attachment to a pet.Each of the stories is told in its own individual style, and the voice of this author, blends wit, mystery, and the enigmatic, to build up just the right amount of tension and possibility without causing the reader to have to suspend disbelief. The stories offer a concise and insightful study of the motivation behind certain behaviors which alter our lives in positive and negative ways, the emotions that control us affecting our mental and physical health, and the prejudices that color our personal perception of things. The book is excellent and each story invites stimulating discussions as each explores the intricacies of our minds with all of our strengths and defects.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In order to feed my craving for more of Hilary Mantel, author of two Booker Prize winning novels of the court of Henry VIII, I picked up a copy of the recently published collection of stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. I have about another year until the third and final volume in the trilogy of Henry, Thomas Cromwell, and the rest of the Tudors of what I consider one of the most interesting dynasties in history. So these ten stories will have to tide me over until then.Mantel exercises all of her literary power in this collection. Only one story – about a 17 year-old-girl with anorexia – disturbed me right out of my enjoyment. The other nine however, are serious, astute, and pleasurable reads.The first item, “Sorry to Disturb,” tells a tale of a husband, who never speaks to his wife. She is affected by an oppressive culture, and her husband’s silence only adds to her misery. The next, “Comma” is a rather peculiar story of two children – both from average middle class families. Kitty is precocious and Mary developmentally challenged. Mary transfers to another school, and and loses touch with Kitty. They bump into each other on the street years later.In “The Long QT,” Jody catches her husband kissing Lorraine, and a surprising result occurs. The next, “Winter Break,” involves a couple on a pre-paid vacation, who jump in the first available taxi, and are off for a bumpy ride. Bettina works as receptionist in a medical building. She tries to befriend a peculiar, lonely woman, but that plan backfires in “Harley Street.” In “Offenses against the Person,” a teen discovers her father’s affair with a co-worker.One of the most interesting stories is “How Shall I Know You?” The narrator is on a book tour, and must put up with grungy hotels, terrible food, and an unending series of dull and clichéd questions. I sense a bit of biography her from Mantel. “Terminus is a creepy story about a woman who sees her dead relatives on a train.That brings us to the Title story, “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: August 6th 1983.” A woman expects a boiler repairman for her home near No. 10 Downing Street. When the bell rings, she admits him. He turns out to be an assassin, who takes over her house. A rather thrilling story to end the collection.I always enjoy English writers for what they add to my vocabulary. Hilary Mantel’s collection of short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher 12 intelligent, interesting, and a worthy read. I don’t “mind the gap” in the Tudor Trilogy as much as I might with these great stories. 5 stars.--Jim, 10/23/14
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wow. These stories come from an amazing, imaginative mind. Some are shocking, many with unexpected endings. Fortunately, the title story appeared in full in this week's New York Times Book Review. A few of these troubling stories will stay with me for a long time.

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The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher - Hilary Mantel

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel

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To Bill Hamilton,

the man in William IV Street:

thirty years on, with gratitude

SORRY TO DISTURB

In those days, the doorbell didn’t ring often, and if it did I would draw back into the body of the house. Only at a persistent ring would I creep over the carpets, and make my way to the front door with its spy hole. We were big on bolts and shutters, deadlocks and mortises, safety chains and windows that were high and barred. Through the spy hole I saw a distraught man in a crumpled, silver-gray suit: thirties, Asian. He had dropped back from the door, and was looking about him, at the closed and locked door opposite, and up the dusty marble stairs. He patted his pockets, took out a balled-up handkerchief, and rubbed it across his face. He looked so fraught that his sweat could have been tears. I opened the door.

At once he raised his hands as if to show he was unarmed, his handkerchief dropping like a white flag. Madam! Ghastly pale I must have looked, under the light that dappled the tiled walls with swinging shadows. But then he took a breath, tugged at his creased jacket, ran a hand through his hair and conjured up his business card. Muhammad Ijaz. Import-Export. I am so sorry to disturb your afternoon. I am totally lost. Would you permit use of your telephone?

I stood aside to let him in. No doubt I smiled. Given what would ensue, I must suppose I did. Of course. If it’s working today.

I walked ahead and he followed, talking; an important deal, he had almost closed it, visit to client in person necessary, time—he worked up his sleeve and consulted a fake Rolex—time running out; he had the address—again he patted his pockets—but the office is not where it should be. He spoke into the telephone in rapid Arabic, fluent, aggressive, his eyebrows shooting up, finally shaking his head; he put down the receiver, looked at it in regret; then up at me, with a sour smile. Weak mouth, I thought. Almost a handsome man, but not: slim, sallow, easily thrown. I am in your debt, madam, he said. Now I must dash.

I wanted to offer him a what—bathroom break? Comfort stop? I had no idea how to phrase it. The absurd phrase wash and brushup came into my mind. But he was already heading for the door—though from the way the call had concluded I thought they might not be so keen to see him, at his destination, as he was to see them. This crazy city, he said. They are always digging up the streets and moving them. I am so sorry to break in on your privacy. In the hall, he darted another glance around and up the stairs. Only the British will ever help you. He skidded across the hall and prized open the outer door with its heavy ironwork screen; admitting, for a moment, the dull roar of traffic from Medina Road. The door swung back, he was gone. I closed the hall door discreetly, and melted into the oppressive hush. The air conditioner rattled away, like an old relative with a loose cough. The air was heavy with insecticide; sometimes I sprayed it as I walked, and it fell about me like bright mists, veils. I resumed my phrasebook and tape, Fifth Lesson: I’m living in Jeddah. I’m busy today. God give you strength!

When my husband came home in the afternoon I told him: A lost man was here. Pakistani. Businessman. I let him in to phone.

My husband was silent. The air conditioner hacked away. He walked into the shower, having evicted the cockroaches. Walked out again, dripping, naked, lay on the bed, stared at the ceiling. Next day I swept the business card into a bin.

In the afternoon the doorbell rang again. Ijaz had come back, to apologize, to explain, to thank me for rescuing him. I made him some instant coffee and he sat down and told me about himself.


IT WAS THEN June 1983. I had been in Saudi Arabia for six months. My husband worked for a Toronto-based company of consulting geologists, and had been seconded by them to the Ministry of Mineral Resources. Most of his colleagues were housed in family compounds of various sizes, but the single men and a childless couple like ourselves had to take what they could get. This was our second flat. The American bachelor who had occupied it before had been moved out in haste. Upstairs, in this block of four flats, lived a Saudi civil servant with his wife and baby; the fourth flat was empty; on the ground floor across the hall from us lived a Pakistani accountant who worked for a government minister, handling his personal finances. Meeting the womenfolk in the hall or on the stairs—one blacked-out head to toe, one partly veiled—the bachelor had livened up their lives by calling Hello! Or possibly Hi there!

There was no suggestion of further impertinence. But a complaint had been made, and he vanished, and we went to live there instead. The flat was small by Saudi standards. It had beige carpet and off-white wallpaper on which there was a faint crinkled pattern, almost indiscernible. The windows were guarded by heavy wooden shutters that you cranked down by turning a handle on the inside. Even with the shutters up it was dim and I needed the strip lights on all day. The rooms were closed off from each other by double doors of dark wood, heavy like coffin lids. It was like living in a funeral home, with samples stacked around you, and insect opportunists frying themselves on the lights.


HE WAS A graduate of a Miami business school, Ijaz said, and his business, his main business just now, was bottled water. Had the deal gone through, yesterday? He was evasive—obviously, there was nothing simple about it. He waved a hand—give it time, give it time.

I had no friends in this city as yet. Social life, such as it was, centered on private houses; there were no cinemas, theaters or lecture halls. There were sports grounds, but women could not attend them. No mixed gatherings were allowed. The Saudis did not mix with foreign workers. They looked down on them as necessary evils, though white-skinned, English-speaking expatriates were at the top of the pecking order. Others—Ijaz, for example—were Third Country Nationals, a label that exposed them to every kind of truculence, insult and daily complication. Indians and Pakistanis staffed the shops and small businesses. Filipinos worked on building sites. Men from Thailand cleaned the streets. Bearded Yemenis sat on the pavement outside lock-up shops, their skirts rucked up, their hairy legs thrust out, their flip-flops inches from the whizzing cars.

I am married, Ijaz said, and to an American; you must meet her. Maybe, he said, maybe you could do something for her, you know? What I foresaw at best was the usual Jeddah arrangement, of couples shackled together. Women had no motive power in this city; they had no driving licenses, and only the rich had drivers. So couples who wanted to visit must do it together. I didn’t think Ijaz and my husband would be friends. Ijaz was too restless and nervy. He laughed at nothing. He was always twitching his collar and twisting his feet in their scuffed Oxfords, always tapping the fake Rolex, always apologizing. Our apartment is down by the port, he said, with my sister-in-law and my brother, but he’s back in Miami just now, and my mother’s here just now for a visit, and my wife from America, and my son and my daughter, aged six, aged eight. He reached for his wallet and showed me a strange-looking, steeple-headed little boy. Saleem.

When he left, he thanked me again for trusting him to come into my house. Why, he said, he might have been anybody. But it is not the British way to think badly of needy strangers. At the door he shook my hand. That’s that, I thought. Part of me thought, it had better be.


FOR ONE WAS always observed: overlooked, without precisely being seen, recognized. My Pakistani neighbor Yasmin, to get between my flat and hers, would fling a scarf over her rippling hair, then peep around the door; with nervous, pecking movements she hopped across the marble, head swiveling from side to side, in case someone should choose that very moment to shoulder through the heavy street door. Sometimes, irritated by the dust that blew under the door and banked up on the marble, I would go out into the hall with a long broom. My male Saudi neighbor would come down from the first floor on his way out to his car and step over my brushstrokes without looking at me, his head averted. He was according me invisibility, as a mark of respect to another man’s wife.

I was not sure that Ijaz accorded me this respect. Our situation was anomalous and ripe for misunderstanding: I had an afternoon caller. He probably thought that only the kind of woman who took a lot of risks with herself would let a stranger into her house. Yet I could not guess what he probably thought. Surely a Miami business school, surely his time in the West, had made my attitude seem more normal than not? His talk was relaxed now he knew me, full of feeble jokes that he laughed at himself; but then there was the jiggling of his foot, the pulling of his collar, the tapping of his fingers. I had noticed, listening to my tape, that his situation was anticipated in the Nineteenth Lesson: I gave the address to my driver, but when we arrived, there wasn’t any house at this address. I hoped to show by my brisk friendliness what was only the truth, that our situation could be simple, because I felt no attraction to him at all; so little that I felt apologetic about it. That is where it began to go wrong—my feeling that I must bear out the national character he had given me, and that I must not slight him or refuse a friendship, in case he thought it was because he was a Third Country National.

For his second visit, and his third, were an interruption, almost an irritation. Having no choice in that city, I had decided to cherish my isolation, coddle it. I was ill in those days, and subject to a fierce drug regime that gave me blinding headaches, made me slightly deaf and made me, though I was hungry, unable to eat. The drugs were expensive and had to be imported from England; my husband’s company brought them in by courier. Word of this leaked out, and the company wives decided I was taking fertility drugs; but I did not know this, and my ignorance made our conversations peculiar and, to me, slightly menacing. Why were they always talking, on the occasions of forced company sociability, about women who’d had miscarriages but now had a bouncing babe in the buggy? An older woman confided that her two were adopted; I looked at them and thought Jesus, where from, the zoo? My Pakistani neighbour also joined in the cooing over the offspring that I would have shortly—she was

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