RaveThe TelegraphGiving Up The Ghost is the least cosy memoir you will ever read. It is prickly, defensive, almost pathologically unsentimental. There are no comforting solidities. Mantel\'s world is one of ghosts, of absences, and of things unsaid because they are on the verges of the communicable, \'a blur . . . a moth\'s wing, flitting about the lamp of meaning\' ... Mantel is superb at catching the moments at which solidity dissolves ... Absences of all kinds haunt these pages, but the ghosts of unborn children are the most unbearable. There is nothing in general more tedious than an account of other people\'s illnesses: Mantel\'s brilliant and extremely odd autobiography - lucid, perceptive, warped into wit by displaced pain - proves the exception to this rule.
