“I tried Ivy Compton-Burnett when I was 20, and it didn’t take. I thought, ‘She can’t actually write.’ I came back six years later, and couldn’t stop reading her; no 20th-century novelist is closer to my heart.”

— Hilary Mantel on Ivy Compton-Burnett and other writers she feels sympathetic or antipathetic to (Henry James is out, Alice and William in) in the New York Times’s “By the Book” column

Thomas Flanagan’s Year of the French

The publication of Hilary Mantel’s new book, Bringing Up the Bodies, sequel to Wolf Hall, has sparked a resurgent interest in historical fiction. One of the titles that she has frequently recommended is The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan. The Year of the French is about the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (Éirí Amach 1798) when a band of Irish patriots, with a company of French Republican troops, land in County Mayo in western Ireland, defeat the English at Castlebar, set up the short lived Republic of Connaught, and then eventually lose at the battle of Ballinamuck.

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