Place of Greater Safety

"The recent book that best captures the character and import of the Revolution for our time is...a novel...Hilary Mantel's 'A Place of Greater Safety' appeared in 1992 to high acclaim in the author's native Great Britain, where she is recognized as one of the best younger novelists at work today....In it...the French Revolution and its claims on our attention and expectation come back to life, as real and unresolved and critical as ever....Mantel...understands as a novelist that rather than simply exhibiting her views, she has an obligation to give her characters and their situation a specific reality of their own: this is the moral realism, as distinct from mere lifelikeness, that corresponds to the formal particularity of true art, and its powers, even when pessimistically informed, are never less than liberating....Hilary Mantel does not minimize the catastrophe of revolutionary hope--indeed, she chronicles it with unflinching thoroughness--but she does not betray that hope either. In our own ugly times, that is itself a hopeful sign."Mantel, Hilary is the author of 'Place of Greater Safety', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312426392 and ISBN 0312426399.