The Giant, O’Brien

London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. Among whom is the Giant, O’Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in the old myths. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. He has, he soon finds, come to die. His opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter. Hunter lusts after the Giant’s corpse, a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge. In her acclaimed novel, Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of two worlds: Ireland and England, poetry and science. As belief wrestles knowledge, so the novel calls from a fork in the road. It is a tale of its time, a timeless tale.”Mantel’s novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history.” (John Bayley, The New York Review of Books)