An Experiment in Love

by HilaryMantel (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.31

    A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year  It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence. Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with recollections of her childhood and an ever difficult relationship with her longtime schoolmate Karina, Carmel reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper. When these bright but confused young women land in late 1960s London, they are confronted with a slew of new preoccupations--sex, politics, food, and fertility--and a pointless grotesque tragedy of their own.  Hilary Mantel's magnificent novel examines the pressures on women during the early days of contemporary feminism to excel--but not be too successful--in England's complex hierarchy of class and status.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $3.31

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $11.67

  Following 'A Change in Climate', this brilliant novel from the double Man Booker prize-winning author of 'Wolf Hall' is a coming-of-age tale set in Seventies London. It is London, 1970. Carmel McBain, in her first term at university, has cut free of her childhood roots in the north. Among the gossiping, flirtatious girls of Tonbridge Hall, she begins her experiments in life and love. But the year turns. The mini-skirt falls out of style and an era of concealment begins. Carmel's world darkens, and tragedy waits in the wings.