Hilary Mantel

“In Accra, Hawa joins the ashawo life – part-time prostitute, occasional concubine, all round good-time girl and the life and soul of every party . . . The ashawo art of negotiation is a delicate one. She seldom knows, before the act, how much money she can expect from a client; by naming a price, she says, you can lose out, as he might want to show his appreciation . . . If the clients insult her with a paltry sum she throws it back at them, saying, ‘Keep it for your repairs.’ When the client says innocently, ‘What repairs?’ she says: ‘You wait.’ Then she smashes up their house or their car. Sometimes the clients try it on – beware the Lebanese identical twins, who try to go two for the price of one . . .”

“’Ecstasies are unforgettable, and they are tyrannical. Those who experience them helplessly shape their lives in order to create the possibility of another encounter with the holy.’ Like all mystics, Gemma is terrified that God will turn his face away. She wants to love God, but is baffled: how do you do it? Her confessor cannot help her. Jesus says to her: ‘See this cross, these thorns, this blood? They are all works of love . . . Do you want to truly love me? First learn to suffer.’”

Let us say, life changes at a glance. Let us say you’re walking forward, you turn your head to look over your shoulder, and behind you the landscape has changed. One life, a life you might have led, is snatched back into the shadows. A different life begins.

This is the day I meet my stepfather; it is the day he meets me. I must not take for granted that you know the topography. You...

“He sank into apathy and for a time became mute, lying curled up on his bed, sometimes refusing food. The story is so distressing that it is not at first clear whether it is moral or useful to pick it apart. Is it cruel in itself, to try to discriminate between degrees of cruelty? It may be so, but we should try to do it, if only to illuminate the dark and blood-stained country we have moved into – the terrain of folk-tales, where monsters and devils dwell in caves and holes.”

When I left St George’s Hospital, I imagined that aspects of my past had been excised, cut cleanly away. My long scar would knit and the memory of the pain would fade. For a time I went backwards and forwards, between England and Africa, and in the end I tried to put down roots in the colder climate, and make my way alone. But by 1982 I was sick again, pain slicing through my vital...