By the Booker Prize-Winning Author of WOLF HALLEvelyn Axon is a medium by trade; her daughter, Muriel, is a half-wit by nature.
Barricaded in their crumbling house, surrounded by the festering rubbish of years, they defy the curiosity of their neighbors and their social worker, Isabel Field.
Isabel is young and inexperienced and has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders the streets, and a lover, Colin, who wants her to run away with him.
But Colin has three horrible children and a shrill wife who is pregnant again--how is he going to run anywhere? As Isabel wrestles with her own problems, a horrible secret grows in the darkness of the Axon household.
When at last it comes to light, the result is by turns hilarious and terrifying.
About the Author Hilary Mantel is the critically acclaimed author of eight novels, seven of which are available in paperback from Henry Holt.
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she lives in England.
Mantel reviews for The New York Times and the New York Review of Books.
