Learning to Talk

Learning to Talk is Hilary Mantel's short story collection, published by Fourth Estate in 2003, and the stories in it sit very close to her own childhood.

They begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village, a place she describes as scoured by bitter winds and rough gossiping tongues. For the child narrator, survival means getting up, getting on and getting out, and the book is about the small conversions that make that possible.

"King Billy Is a Gentleman" is about losing a father and puzzling over a fading Irish inheritance. "Curved Is the Line of Beauty" turns on friendship, faith and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. In the title story the narrator has her northern vowels ironed out by an elocution teacher, an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent of her own. In "Third Floor Rising" she watches her mother assemble a stylish new self out of a department-store job.

The stories are funny in the way Mantel is usually funny, which is to say sharply and without much mercy. Read together they work almost as a memoir, and they are the closest thing to a companion piece to Giving Up the Ghost.