The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel

Hilary Mantel

Macmillan, Jun 12, 2007 - Fiction - 208 pages

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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - bodachliath - LibraryThing

An intriguing mixture of fact and fantasy. Unlike the Cromwell novels and A Place of Greater Safety, the need for invention is clear here. Although the Irish giant Charles Byrne and the surgeon John ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - passion4reading - LibraryThing

Charles O'Brien, a gentle Irish giant with the soul of a poet, arrives in London with his agent and his band of followers to be exhibited among the better-off citizens. One who comes to the see him ...

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 19
• Section 3: 21
• Section 4: 25
• Section 5: 56
• Section 6: 62
• Section 7: 80
• Section 8: 102
• Section 9: 121
• Section 10: 138
• Section 11: 152
• Section 12: 177

About the author

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She is also the author of A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater 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. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. She lives in England with her husband.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel
• Author: Hilary Mantel
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Macmillan, 2007
• ISBN: 0312426887, 9780312426880
• Length: 208 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Historical / General; Fiction / Literary