I cannot get out of my mind, now, the village where I was born, just out of the curl of the city’s tentacles.
In the wake of the publication of her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, Hilary Mantel discusses the re-release of Learning to Talk, a classic collection of loosely autobiographical stories that reveal the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. “It is in sparkling writing such as this that the truth is told,” writes Penelope Lively. “These stories are a maverick vision of growing up acute and disenchanted in the north in the mid-20th century.”