I don't often read nonfiction, but when I do, it's by authors whom I respect. Hilary Mantel is one such author. This book is great.

Until now I had only read Hilary Mantel’s brilliant novels. These stories are a real gift to treasure now that she has sadly passed away. Sharp and funny. A real treat.

I love Hilary Mantel's work, but I struggled through this collection. I respect her enough to give it a second chance. It was weird finding on NetGalley since it originally came out in 2003. That context might have helped a little bit, good to know the age of the author when she's reflecting on her past.

This collection of short stories chronicle growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in northern England. Odd neighbors, gossipy coworkers, teens with angst, hypochondria, and religious prejudices all characterize this era. The title story is the most poignant as the main character attempts to wrestle her northern accent into a form of RP, but overall the style is a bit too literary for my tastes. Fans of Mantel's larger works may find her writing style more accessible.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This is my first Mantel, which is kind of a ridiculous admission given how popular Wolf Hall was and is, but sometimes it's just a matter of timing--this came up in NetGalley, and I have so many physical books that Wolf Hall will come up eventually.

I loved the meat of these stories--I loved when the story got rolling with either dialogue or plot, when we were moving forward, but what bogged me down a bit was when Mantel got expository and told the backstory. It's a tough bit to navigate in short fiction--how do you tell enough of what you need to know about the characters without the reader's mind wandering too much?

But I adored the internal part of the stories, which had the subtlest kinds of hauntings--ghosts, absent fathers, a city drowned by a dam, runaway dogs, the wreckage of something not entirely clear. These stories were rich with reality paired with what catches us just beyond our sight, stews at the dinner table, and reading by lamplight. They felt like drizzly stories, stories with chalkboards and crisp school blazers and dogs with longing eyes.

I was able to read an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review via the publisher and NetGalley, both of whom I thank.

As a long-time fan of Hilary Mantel's work, I was delighted to learn about LEARNING TO TALK. This story collection draws on Mantel's own life as fodder. As always, her writing is expressive and multi-layered. The plots of the stories, while not fast-paced, move along at a nice clip. Mantel really excels at setting an evocative scene and making the reader feel present in the landscape and time period. I'm most impressed by her characterizations. Many of these characters will stick with me for a long time.

Gorgeous short stories that are autobiographical written with such grace and complexity - stunning. I was a big fan before reading this and even moreso now. Read the Preface. Enjoy the new words you’ll learn and the beauty of a sentence only Hilary Mantel could write. Thanks to Henry Holt and Co for the copy.

Hilary Mantel's Learninv To Talk is a good collection of her early year memories, whether deformed or adapted by her brain or factual or even romanticized. Nobody really knows how the brain works and why it picks certains details and leaves others behind. I particularly loved learning about her school years, her relationship with her mother and father and her first professional experience.

A very quick read and some good life lessons to be taken away.

Thank you Net Galley and the publisher for this e-ARC in exchange of my honest review.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* i have heard a lot about this book and wanted to read it so i was happy to see i got approved for it and due it being a shorter book, it was easy to finish in one go. would recommend.

This is a delightful collection of semi-autobiographical short stories that the author has collected over the years. She is an accomplished author and I've enjoyed her novels in the past but this is an enjoyable change.

"The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synesthetic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which reemerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines." So writes Hilary Mantel in Giving Up the Ghost, the final of seven short stories that comprise Learning to Talk. Previously published, the first U.S. edition comes out later this month with a new preface from Mantel.

Musings on her past read like a memoir, evoking place and time, her varied childhood living arrangements in the villages of northern England. I was both captivated and challenged by the depth of these stories.

The writing is layered, rich, conjuring fantastical imagery: "It was a small gray car, like a jelly mold, out of which a giant might turn a foul jelly of profanity and grease." and "They were a fiction, perhaps an antique one; perhaps even older than Daphne. They were an adjustment to reality. They were a tale told by an idiot: to which I had added a phrase or two." [these beautiful sentences describing...an unreconciled dress inventory.]

My thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Hilary Mantel writes so beautifully her prose her characters come alive.Each story drew me in kept me involved.A very special collection that I will be recommending.#netgalley #henryholt

Hilary Mantel could write just about anything and I would read it, because I know that the writing will be in her singular and spectacular style. And "Learning to Talk," her latest collection of seven short stories, had me highlighting practically the entire book because the word choices are just so perfect. Take this description of one of her characters from the story "Third Floor Rising": "It came from a shuddering white face, from wagging jowls, from a slow rolling mass of flesh, fiercely corseted inside a dress of stretched black polyester: corseted into the shape of a bulbous flower vase, and the skin with the murky sheen of carnation water two days old." Mantel has a way of choosing unusual verbs and evocative similes and metaphors that feels distinctly her own. Unsold clothing is "bastilled in distant stockrooms"; rescue parties are "baffled by dank fogs, which crept over the landscape like sheets drawn over corpses"; salespeople glare at customers with "rheumy malice." The England of these stories is a grim place--in "King Billy Is a Gentleman," the narrator describes how she turns her "very gimlet eye" on a neighbor, "words of violence bursting into my mouth, contained there swilling and bloody, like loose teeth." That description could apply, in fact, to Mantel's narrative voice throughout the collection, as her characters grapple with difficult lives while "somewhere else, in factories, fields and coal mines, England went dully on." Brilliant.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

I really enjoyed reading Learning to Talk. Is there anyone currently writing better sentences than Hilary Mantel? I submit that the answer is no, and this short story collection showcased that gift for luminous prose.

I also love the way these stories will offer up observations-turned revelations, giving us not only insight on the characters, but on the wider world. These stories are wise and genuinely fun to read.

That said, as a diehard fan of Mantel's novels, I missed seeing her work on a large canvas. She takes her time developing characters so that they seem to come to life in front of the reader. Here, she uses a similar technique, leaving the characters to feel vague and somewhat unfinished. I'm not sure if that's due in part to the autofictional components of the collection that Mantel notes in the introduction, or the length of the stories, but either way it slightly lessened my enjoyment.

All in all, though, Learning to Talk was a beautifully written collection and I enjoyed all my time with it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt for an advance copy of Learning to Talk in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I really loved this book of stories from Hilary Mantel! I listened to the audiobook while reading along. The stories use different narrators in the audiobook version, which helped break up the stories. The stories had a great sense of place in England, and some deal with the themes of moving and change. There were a few that feature children as the narrator, which I enjoyed and don't often read. The writing was beautiful and lyrical. The narrators were very calming!

Any reader of contemporary literature will likely know Ms. Mantel, who is most well known for her fantastic trilogy of historical fiction beginning with Wolf Hall. For anyone interested in Ms. Mantel and her writing, or even looking to be introduced to her for the first time, this short collection of short stories is highly recommended. There are seven stories, focusing on youth and childhood and, as Ms. Mantel indicates in her Preface, they are somewhat auto-biographical. The stories incorporate so much detail of the period and setting, much like Ms. Mantel's prior works of historical fiction, and they are a wonderful read. I love short stories as a form and Ms. Mantel proves she is as skilled with this format as she is the novel. Definitely recommended, especially for fans of Ms. Mantel who will enjoy the insights into her childhood and early life.

More of a memoir than a collection of short stories. Well written …the story about her working in a department store was the most interesting…Worth reading,,good but not great