The Giant, O’Brien - Hardcover

Unfortunately, O'Brien's height attracts more attention than he might wish for: John Hunter, a surgeon, becomes fascinated with the giant and obsessed with the possibility of dissecting him after he's dead. Thus Mantel sets up the central conflict of her novel: Hunter's thirst for knowledge and fame versus O'Brien's conviction that, without his body, his soul cannot go to heaven. In the mean streets of 18th-century London, the author explores the division of soul and body, imagination and rationalism, as she juxtaposes the two men's lives. In this collision of cultures and paradigms, she offers no easy answers, but instead turns a disturbing spotlight on questions that continue to resonate to the present day. --Alix Wilber

A novelist without peer in her generation . . . No reader who loves fiction should miss this opportunity to read this extraordinary work. "San Francisco Chronicle"

Mantel's novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history. "The New York Review of Books""

A novelist without peer in her generation . . . No reader who loves fiction should miss this opportunity to read this extraordinary work. San Francisco Chronicle

Mantel's novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history. The New York Review of Books

"A novelist without peer in her generation . . . No reader who loves fiction should miss this opportunity to read this extraordinary work." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Mantel's novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history." --The New York Review of Books