From the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall a wry shocking & beautiful memoir of childhood ghosts hauntings illness & family. Giving up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantels uniquely unusual five-part autobiography. Opening in 1995 with A Second Home Mantel describes the death of her stepfather which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of her childhood. In Now Geoffrey Dont Torment Her Mantel takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood culminating in the birth of a younger brother & the strange candlelight ceremony of her mothers churching. In Smile an account of teenage perplexity Mantel describes a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Finally at the memoirs conclusion Mantel explains how through a series of medical misunderstandings & neglect she came to be childless & how the ghosts of the unborn like chances missed or pages unturned have come to haunt her life as a writer.