The Giant, O'Brien

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [viii], 210, [1]. Gilt-embossed decorative maroon cloth with grey endpapers, in overprinted translucent acetate dustjacket designed by Tracey Winwood.

Signed by Mantel to title-page.

Author's eighth novel. Longlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. A fictionalized account of Irish giant Charles Byrne (O'Brien) and Scottish surgeon John Hunter, set in 1780s London.

In the postscript to the 2010 paperback edition Mantel reveals that while intending to write "a big, realistic historical novel about John Hunter", she had an epiphany that she herself was Irish, and felt "that in order to find [her]self [she] had to go back and capture that voice, that Irishness. So the novel became about the giant utterly, and the giant's people, and the giant's transition from speaking Irish to speaking English".

Adapted for BBC Radio 4 by the author, the play starred Lloyd Hutchinson as the Giant, and Alex Norton as John Hunter. Twice-winner of the Booker Prize with her epic Tudor novels Wolf Hall (2009), and Bringing Up the Bodies (2012). "Mantel is one of the great twentieth-century storytellers... a novelist without peer in her generation." –Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle