Every Day is Mother's Day

First edition. 8vo., 212 pp. Publisher's pumpkin-yellow cloth, lettered in gilt to spine. Jacket design by Suzanne Perkins (priced £8.95 net to front flap).

Usual tanning to textblock edges, due to poor quality stock used, hinges starting but firm, faint waterstain centred to crown of dustwrapper spine, else a sound, fine copy, in pristine boards. Colouring and lettering of unclipped jacket, exceptionally bright and crisp.

A black comedy of suburban mayhem and revenge set in mid-1970s Britain. Mantel's scarce first novel inspired by her stint as a social worker at a geriatric hospital, and informed by Thatcher's 1980s policy of 'care in the community', when residential social care was being dismantled. Her second novel, Vacant Possession (1986), picks up the story a decade hence. "[E]xtremely funny... she reminded me of the early Muriel Spark." –Auberon Waugh