Vacant Possession

Vacant Possession is Hilary Mantel's second novel, published by Chatto and Windus in 1986, and it picks up the cast of her debut roughly a decade later.

Muriel Axon has been locked away for society's protection. The years inside have done nothing to dull her, and when she is released she comes back with a talent for disguise and a long memory. Her old social worker Isabel has moved on; so have the neighbours. Muriel gets into their houses anyway, and starts arranging their lives from the inside.

Everything converges. Mantel steers the whole thing toward a single gruesome set piece with the timing of a farce, and the effect is genuinely funny and genuinely horrible at once. The wit is at its most unsparing here, and the book is as much about how comfortably people forget what they did as it is about revenge.

It reads perfectly well alone, but it lands harder if you have read Every Day Is Mother's Day first.