Product Description

Following on from 'A Change in Climate', this brilliant novel follows two girls as they leave behind their pasts and set off to the new preoccupations of 1970s London. It is London, 1970. Carmel McBain, in her first terma t university, has cut free of her childhood roots in the north. Among the gossiping, flirtatious girls of Tonbridge Hall, she begins her experiments in life and love. But the year turns. The mini-skirt falls out of style and an era of concealment begins. Carmel's world darkens, and tragedy waits in the wings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18011 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
'Hilary Mantel is a wonderfully unsurprised dissector of human motivation, and in An Experiment in Love she has written a bleak tale seamed with crackling wit.' Helen Dunmore, Observer 'Funny, tragic and wondefully perceptive, this is a book to be treasured, for the sheer quality of its writing and for its honesty.' Independent 'Mantel writes prose of imperturbable aplomp, crisp with irony and highlighted with deftly places, elegantly surprising images ! she has a penchant for caustic, spiky heroines and a sardonic ear for dialogue.' Sunday Times 'My favourite novel of the year: An Experiment in Love is written with subtle perceptiveness, sharp wit and canny wisdom' Margaret Forster, Independent 'Cool unsentimental, and unassumingly authoritative.' Anita Brookner, Spectator 'The time is 1970, and it is wonderfully well evoked ! The skill with which Mantel manages her time-shifts, the precision of her writing, the acuteness of her observations, the seriousness of her themes, and the way in which she weaves them into a coherant whole, make this an unusually satisfying novel.' Allan Massie, Scotsman 'An Experiment in Love has much to say about its turbulant era, and is replete with the atmosphere of the cusp, with the prospect of irreversible change ! It is also a profoundly sad novel, to which Mantel's liberal sense of comedy and dazzling acuity for metaphor add an almost excruciating flavour.' Rachel Cusk, The Times 'The most powerful of her novels, a near-faultless masterpiece of pathos, observation and feeling ! She writes like an angel.' Sunday Telegraph

About the Author
Hilary Mantel is one of our most important living writers. She is the author of eleven books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Giving Up the Ghost, and, most recently, Beyond Black, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize.

Customer Reviews

Carmel and Karina
Carmel is an ordinary little Catholic girl from a Lancashire mill-town when this novel opens. Her strong-willed mother has decided that she will be a friend to Karina, whose strange European mother and taciturn father mutter about cattle trucks. Karina is not ordinary. She has no gift for friendship and the relationship is something of a trial to Carmel. By the time they attend big school Carmel has moved on and begun making friends with more interesting girls. It is one of these, Julia, that she rooms with in the hostel that is the main setting when they get to University. Karina goes too, but lives a curiously self-sufficient and separate life from that of her peers. The one shocking act at the end brings Carmel's past relationship with Karina into focus once again. She now knows two very important things about Karina - but neither of them can be told to anyone else.

This is both a tragedy and a comedy. Mantel is very prescient about girls and their friendships, and about girls and their boys. There is much to enjoy in these pages and I found myself disappointed that this novel wasn't longer. Like her novel Beyond Black, this one too creates some wonderful characters, and in common with that novel it ends at a point that might also be a beginning. Her gift for storytelling is so strong that her created lives go on after the book has finished.