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Summary
Summary
A dark and uproarious tale of revenge.
Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon did her ma in, ten years of living in a mental asylum. But Muriel has not forgotten her welfare worker, Isabel, or her neighbor, Colin. Nor has she forgiven. There are still scores to be settled-and vengeance to be wreaked. In a novel that is wildly funny and daringly wicked, Mantel brings the full force of her black humor to bear on a cast of characters that is by turns wacky and malevolent. As Muriel dons disguises to get back at the world that imprisoned her, we follow a trail that is wonderfully macabre with enough twists and turns to qualify this book as a thriller.
Author Notes
Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England on July 6, 1952. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She worked as a social worker in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia. She returned to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah. She worked as a film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991.
She has written numerous books including Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, A Place of Greater Safety, A Change of Climate, The Giant, O'Brien, Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir, and Beyond Black. She made The New York Times Best Seller List with her title The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. She has won several awards for her work including the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize for Fludd; the 1996 Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love, the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, and the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Bring up the Bodies. Book three of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was named the best book of 2020 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, and others. Hilary Mantel died on September 22, 2022 from complications of a stroke. She was 70.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The haunting sequel to Mantel's Every Day Is Mother's Day (see above) offers powerful insight into its precursor. Muriel Axon is the untouchable yet tarnished heroine here, and she selectively reveals her disturbing plans for revenge against all who vaguely knew and despised her. A decade after the close of the first book, Muriel has just been released from the institution where she was housed after her mother's suspicious death, and has since acquired new skills to aid her vengeful mission. Taking on the identity of "Poor Mrs. Wilmot," she rents a room from paranoid Russian landlord Mr. Kowalski and works the night shift as a cleaning lady at St. Matthew Hospital, where, not coincidentally, she assumes an unlikely bedside manner with the elder Mrs. Sidney and her former social worker Isabel Field's bedridden father. Mrs. Sidney's son, Colin; his wife, Sylvia; and their four children have moved into the former Axon home despite its history as a house of violent tragedy. Even after a renovation and the help of a new though odd housekeeper, Lizzie Blank, the house refuses to be maintained. Although Colin ended an affair years ago, the strain of being the breadwinner while being ignored by the civic-minded Sylvia and hassled by his money-grubbing teenagers allows him to entertain the fantasy of finding his lost lover. And he does reconnect, thanks in part to his naive, 18-year-old daughter. Surprise revelations from start to finish mark Mantel as a remarkably clever writer whose second book, paired with her first, makes for wickedly pleasurable reading. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The sequel to Mantel's first novel (see above), originally published in 1986, continues the story of retarded woman Muriel Axon's life following her mother's death and her own ten-year incarceration in a mental hospital. Released when public funding disappears and her second ``home'' closes its doors, Muriel, now 44, uses the animal cunning her sufferings have taught her to assume different personalities: as herself, a hired domestic named Lizzie (after the celebrated axe-murderess) Blank, and the den mother, in effect, of a loose society of former fellow inmates'all the while assuring herself ``I won't always need to be three people. It's only till I give them their comeuppance.'' The pronoun denotes those people Muriel imagines guilty of placing on her the blame for her mother's ``accident'': their inept social worker Isabel (now married, and a mother-to-be) and especially the family of Isabel's former lover Colin Sidney, who has bought the Axons' old house. Muriel now returns there, as (Colin's wife) Sylvia Sidney's hired help. As before, Mantel weaves together the fates of this story's hilariously, inextricably mutually involved characters (including Colin's teenaged daughter Suzanne, defiantly pregnant by the husband of you-may-well-guess-whom) with impressive dexterity. Characters who seemed only marginal in Every Day. . . 'such as Isabel's doddering father Philip Field and Colin's flustered sister Florence'here become important linchpins in the construction that is the juggernaut of Muriel Axon, hellbent on punishing those who have assumed her imbecility and robbed her of her due. The narrative gathers fearful momentum as Mantel isolates and makes grim ironic use of several cryptic and crucial found objects: a set of disembodied teeth, a phrenologist's demonstration head, and a tiny skeleton. An ingenious melodrama, and a wintry portrayal of insulted and injured souls that William Trevor might well envy. With this novel Mantel achieved full technical mastery, and she's only got better since.
Booklist Review
Henry Holt and Company is publishing the first two novels of popular British author Hilary Mantel in paperback. These two, set in the economically trying times of suburban London of the early 1980s, cover the oddities and foibles of a rather large, interconnected collection of people. The Axons, spiritual-medium mother and half-witted daughter, prove to be a social worker's nightmare. The neighbors, the Sydneys, though seemingly more average, are perhaps more bizarre in the long run. Their lovers, enemies, friends, and relatives come together to present a picture of life that is darkly comic, with the emphasis most strongly on dark. Every Day Is Mother's Day tells a tale of madness, possession, adultery, pregnancy, and murder. Vacant Possession brings us back to these same characters a few years later, where a strange sort of justice is meted out. Although Vacant Possession is most certainly a sequel, each novel is a complete story and each stands on its own very well. The writing is sharp and acerbic; the situations are funny and politically incorrect by any age's standards. They will make you laugh, but you won't feel comfortable about it. --Danise Hoover
Library Journal Review
A rundown, and possibly haunted, Victorian house takes center stage in these back-to-back black comedies, written by British novelist Mantel (The Giant, O'Brien) with a distinct Rendellian flavor. In the first story, set in the mid-Seventies, Evelyn Axon, a terrorized, guilt-ridden widow, lives with her dull-witted daughter, Muriel. Into their lives comes the nettlesome social service bureaucracy, primarily in the person of Isabel Field, the last in a long series of social workers assigned to their case. Isabel has problems of her own, though, the main one being a stagnating affair with Colin Sydney, a married man she has met in an evening class on creative writing. Muriel has been encouraged to participate in weekly workshops for the mentally handicapped at the local community center, but she eludes both her mother and her case workers and manages to get herself pregnant. All these lives intersect at the novel's bizarre conclusion, as Evelyn dies, Muriel is institutionalized, and Colin Sydney's family take up residence in the Axons' house. The second novel opens ten years later as Muriel is caught up in the Eighties trend to deinstitutionalize the mentally challenged. Out on the streets once more, she knowingly adopts multiple personas with the misguided intention of exacting revenge on those she believes have wronged her, principally Isabel Field and Colin Sydney. Slowly, all these entangled lives begin to come undone. Like her fellow Brits Rose Tremain and Penelope Fitzgerald, Mantel continually produces novels that chart fresh terrain and derive from a wellspring of creative imagination. These two early novels herald the promise of the rich and varied literary career that followed. Recommended for most public libraries.--Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.