"The strangest, creepiest, most sorrow-and-pity-inducing book I've read for a very long time . . . [and] a great ghost story. A chilling masterpiece." –Philip Pullman
"A terrible and swirling horror-comedy about a very fat medium on the perimeter of the M25, haunted by mean and nasty spirits, veering between damnation and the trivial." –
A. S. Byatt "Funny and harrowing. . . A great comic novel. Hilary Mantel's humor, like Flannery O'Connor's, is so far beyond black it becomes a kind of light." –
The New York Times Book Review "Beautifully written . . . Strange, funny, and affecting . . . Mantel is . . . the possessor of a peerless prose style." –
John Banville "Spooky, smart, and deep." –
Claire Dederer, New York magazine "[One of] my favourite [books] of the year . . . More people really need to get with the concept that Mantel is one of the best writers in England." –
Zadie Smith "Her finest [novel] . . . Mantel's writing is so exact and brilliant that, in itself, it seems an act of survival, even redemption." –
The New Yorker "Original and deeply dark . . . New and compelling . . . With
Beyond Black [Mantel] shows us how fiction can lift us into the extraordinary." –
The Washington Post Book World "Grimly seductive [work from] a writer of dark extremities. [Mantel] performs as if from the depths of a well, her prolonged bleakness pierced by splinters of beauty and treacherous wit. . . . Imperceptibly, artfully, Mantel has elevated her material monsters into metaphysical monsters." –
The Boston Globe "Inventive, delightful, subversive [and] dead serious . . . Hilary Mantel has taken . . . those moments between sleep and waking, when we hardly know who we are, or why, and turned them into a novel that makes the unbelievable believable. . . . This is a book out of the unconscious, where the best novels come from." –
Faye Weldon, The Guardian (U.K.)