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    Vacant Possession
    Vacant Possession
    Vacant Possession
    Audiobook9 hours

    Vacant Possession

    Written by Hilary Mantel

    Narrated by Sandra Duncan

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon was locked away for society's protection, but psychiatric confinement has only increased her malice and ingenuity. At last free, she sets into motion an intricate plan to exact revenge on those who had her put away. Her former social worker, Isabel, and her old neighbors have moved on, but Muriel, with her talent for disguise, will infiltrate their homes and manipulate their lives, until all her enemies are brought together for a gruesome finale. Hilary Mantel's razor-sharp wit animates every page of this darkly comic tale of retribution.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 25, 2014
    ISBN9781470366711
    Vacant Possession
    Author

    Hilary Mantel

    Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.

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    Reviews for Vacant Possession

    3.5/5

    65 ratings7 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      At the end of Hilary Mantel?s first novel, ?Every Day is Mother?s Day,? Muriel Axon is sent to a psychiatric institution after a series of unpleasant events that lead to the death of both her infant and her mother Evelyn. ?Vacant Possession? takes place ten years later, and recounts Muriel?s time in the asylum and the period after her release, during which she hatches a complicated scheme to take revenge on the people whom Muriel blames for those deaths. Along the way, she takes on a variety of identities, including that as Lizzie Blank, the housekeeper for the Sidney family, who now live in the house Muriel and Evelyn used to share, and as ?Poor Mrs. Wilmot,? a cleaner at the hospital where Isabel Field?s father is a patient. Isabel, as readers of the first book will remember, is the social-worker assigned to the Axons, who had an affair with Mr. Sidney. In ?Vacant Possession? yet more connections between the Fields, the Axons, and the Sidneys are revealed. Indeed, coincidences run rampant in this book, and the tangled connections between the main characters go on and on. But never mind: the story is gripping and wickedly funny, and once again displays Ms. Mantel?s wonderful skills as an author.
    • 4/5
      Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel - very Good

      I really shouldn't put off writing down my thoughts on the books I read, it's been almost a month since I read this and I've read another 4 and a half since then. Nevertheless, this one has stuck with me.

      Written back in 1986 well before the dizzy heights of Wolf Hall et al, this is a very strange little book. Bleakly, darkly funny and a little disturbing, the story centres around Murial Axon, newly released from an institution and hell bent on destroying those she blames for putting her there.

      I'm trying not to put any spoilers in, but the characters we meet have all got more than just Murial in common and the story builds to a final denouement which leaves you wondering about many things.

      This settles for me that Hilary Mantel is an author I need to backtrack on.

      Definitely more than just a writer of historical fiction.
    • 4/5
      At the end of Hilary Mantel’s first novel, “Every Day is Mother’s Day,” Muriel Axon is sent to a psychiatric institution after a series of unpleasant events that lead to the death of both her infant and her mother Evelyn. “Vacant Possession” takes place ten years later, and recounts Muriel’s time in the asylum and the period after her release, during which she hatches a complicated scheme to take revenge on the people whom Muriel blames for those deaths. Along the way, she takes on a variety of identities, including that as Lizzie Blank, the housekeeper for the Sidney family, who now live in the house Muriel and Evelyn used to share, and as “Poor Mrs. Wilmot,” a cleaner at the hospital where Isabel Field’s father is a patient. Isabel, as readers of the first book will remember, is the social-worker assigned to the Axons, who had an affair with Mr. Sidney. In “Vacant Possession” yet more connections between the Fields, the Axons, and the Sidneys are revealed. Indeed, coincidences run rampant in this book, and the tangled connections between the main characters go on and on. But never mind: the story is gripping and wickedly funny, and once again displays Ms. Mantel’s wonderful skills as an author.
    • 1/5
      Muriel spent ten years locked in a psychiatric ward plotting and planning against those who put her away. Her former social worker, her old neighbors and anyone who had crossed her path seems to be fair game.I had a very hard time getting into this book. I found the characters a bit...flat, and the plot a bit predictable. Overall, I was pretty disappointed with this book.
    • 4/5
      Hilary Mantel is such an excellent writer. This one is about a bunch of relatively normal, screwed-up people and their neuroses, alcoholism, psychoses, peccadilloes, etc. Very British.
    • 2/5
      I enjoyed her book Wolf Hall and i think i've read one other by her that i liked but this one, i didn't really like much. I found it very confusing. It kept jumping around from character to character, most of whom for the longest time didn't seem at all connected. Apparently it's a sequel to another book but I don't think that really made a difference to my confusion. Some of the relevant background got filled in as we went along. The story starts off with a middle aged teacher and his family who are living in an old house that used to be owned by a mother who was a real "mommie dearest" and controlled her adult daughter, Muriel until she died. Muriel has been in an institution for 10 years and is now released. The teacher's daughter is having an affair with a married man, whose wife used to be the teacher's mistress. Muriel, in disguise, got herself hired as a cleaning lady for the teacher's family and she also works nights in a different disguise cleaning in a nursing home type hospital where the teacher's mother is and where the father of the ex-mistress also is, who also happens to be the father of the baby Muriel had when she was younger, (her mother made her kill the infant apparently, this would have been in that first book, i gather). You see how confusing this all is? Anyway, i thought about giving up on it a few times but i stayed with it and was not rewarded with the ending which seemed to leave things hanging. Or maybe it was just me.
    • 3/5
      I admire HM's skill with the voices of her characters, the things they say to each other, distinctive, strongly flavoured, a good commentary. Read the book eagerly, but it left a bad taste. It couldn't finish well, but neither did it finish badly. It didn't finish at all, I would have preferred if it had.