The Giant, O'Brien - by Hilary Mantel (Paperback)

About the Book

A sick Irish giant in 18th century London is offered money by an anatomist if he will bequeath his body. The giant refuses, he wants to enter heaven whole, but the anatomist gets the body anyway. A parable on man of myth versus man of science. By the author of Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A novelist without peer in her generation . . . No reader who loves fiction should miss this opportunity to read this extraordinary work." --San Francisco Chronicle

"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." --The New York Review of Books

About the Author

Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.