‘ Beyond Black feels like a great, gleeful binge, a wallow in the not-good-for-you riches of this writer’s extraordinarily vivid, violent imagination. This is a dark, dark book, but it’s fun to read because at heart it’s a celebration of the joys of saying exactly what’s on your evil little mind.’

In this book Mantel, back on her home turf of fiction (this is her ninth novel), allows herself to gorge on simile and metaphor and wild comic invention -- the treats she had tried, and guiltily failed, to deny herself while following the hard-fact regimen of "Giving Up the Ghost."+ (At one point in the novel, Alison is put on a diet by stern Colette, and she suffers agonies.) "Beyond Black" feels like a great, gleeful binge, a wallow in the not-good-for-you riches of this writer's extraordinarily vivid, violent imagination.