The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel

The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. In the midst of it all is the Giant, O'Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in myths, fairies, miracles, and little people. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. O'Brien's opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter, who lusts after the Giant's corpse as a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

In her acclaimed novel, two-time Man Booker Prize winning author Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of Ireland and England. As belief wrestles knowledge and science wrestles song, so The Giant, O'Brien calls to us from a fork in the road as a tale of time, and a timeless tale.

Hilary Mantel is the author of several best-selling novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. The Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award were also given to Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy. A Change of Climate, A Place of Better Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O'Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother's Day, and Vacant Possession are some of her other works. She's also the author of the memoir Giving Up the Ghost. The Hawthornden Award was awarded to Mantel, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. Her husband and she live in England.