Beyond Black: A Novel

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearColette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. This is Hilary Mantel at her finest--insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read.

Philip Pullman

“The strangest, creepiest, most sorrow-and-pity-inducing book I've read for a very long time . . . [and] a great ghost story. A chilling masterpiece.”

A. S. Byatt

“A terrible and swirling horror-comedy about a very fat medium on the perimeter of the M25, haunted by mean and nasty spirits, veering between damnation and the trivial.”

The New York Times Book Review

“Funny and harrowing. . . A great comic novel. Hilary Mantel's humor, like Flannery O'Connor's, is so far beyond black it becomes a kind of light.”

John Banville

“Beautifully written . . . Strange, funny, and affecting . . . Mantel is . . . the possessor of a peerless prose style.”

Claire Dederer, New York magazine

“Spooky, smart, and deep.”

Zadie Smith

“[One of] my favourite [books] of the year . . . More people really need to get with the concept that Mantel is one of the best writers in England.”

The New Yorker

“Her finest [novel] . . . Mantel's writing is so exact and brilliant that, in itself, it seems an act of survival, even redemption.”

The Washington Post Book World

“Original and deeply dark . . . New and compelling . . . With Beyond Black [Mantel] shows us how fiction can lift us into the extraordinary.”

The Boston Globe

“Grimly seductive [work from] a writer of dark extremities. [Mantel] performs as if from the depths of a well, her prolonged bleakness pierced by splinters of beauty and treacherous wit. . . . Imperceptibly, artfully, Mantel has elevated her material monsters into metaphysical monsters.”

Faye Weldon, The Guardian (U.K.)

“Inventive, delightful, subversive [and] dead serious . . . Hilary Mantel has taken . . . those moments between sleep and waking, when we hardly know who we are, or why, and turned them into a novel that makes the unbelievable believable. . . . This is a book out of the unconscious, where the best novels come from.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Beyond BlackA NovelBy Mantel, HilaryPicadorCopyright ©2006 Mantel, HilaryAll right reserved.ISBN: 0312426054Chapter OneTravelling: the dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway, its wastes looping London: the margin’s scrub grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon. Four o’clock: light sinking over the orbital road. Teatime in Enfield, night falling on Potter’s Bar. There are nights when you don’t want to do it, but you have to do it anyway. Nights when you look down from the stage and see closed stupid faces. Messages from the dead arrive at random. You don’t want them and you can’t send them back. The dead won’t be coaxed and they won’t be coerced. But the public has paid its money and it wants results.A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.Beside her, in profile against the fogged window, the driver’s face is set. In the back seat, something dead stirs, and begins to grunt and breathe. The car flees across the junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space inside her: the arena of combat, the wasteland, the place of civil strife behind her ribs. A heart beats, taillights wink. Dim lights shine from tower blocks, from passing helicopters, from fixed stars. Night closes in on the perjured ministers and burnt-out pedophiles, on the unloved viaducts and graffitied bridges, on ditches beneath mouldering hedgerows and railings never warmed by human touch.Night and winter: but in the rotten nests and empty setts, she can feel the signs of growth, intimations of spring. This is the time of Le Pendu, the Hanged Man, swinging by his foot from the living tree. It is a time of suspension, of hesitation, of the indrawn breath. It is a time to let go of expectation, yet not abandon hope; to anticipate the turn of the Wheel of Fortune. This is our life and we have to lead it. Think of the alternative.A static cloud bank, like an ink smudge. Darkening air.It’s no good asking me whether I’d choose to be like this, because I’ve never had a choice. I don’t know about anything else. I’ve never been any other way.And darker still. Colour has run out from the land. Only form is left: the clumped treetops like a dragon’s back. The sky deepens to midnight blue. The orange of the streetlights is blotted to a fondant cerise; in pastureland, the pylons lift their skirts in a ferrous gavotte.Copyright © 2005 by Hilary MantelContinues...Excerpted from Beyond Black by Mantel, Hilary Copyright ©2006 by Mantel, Hilary. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

About the Author

Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.

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