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by Hilary Mantel
It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden--and hugely but erotically ugly.
Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. In the swells of revolution, they each taste the addictive delights of power, and the price that must be paid for it.
What are you reading this week? (9/04/2025)
...to read Las Madres: Latinas in the Heartland Who Led Their Families to Success by Dennis Raphael Garcia and continue love it. Gave up on listening to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. It was too hard to keep track of the characters and places and understand the terms due to my very limited knowledge of the French language. Definit...
-Lana_Maskus
What are you reading this week? (8/28/2025)
...early Mexican immigrants who came to the USA primarily to make a better life for themselves and their families. I also just started the audiobook of A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. It's 33+ hours so I hope I can stick to it.
-Lana_Maskus
What are you reading this week? (8/7/2025)
...waiting list. Have 20 minutes left on Candide by Voltaire (on James Mustich's list of 1000 Books to Read Before You Die). Thinking about listening to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, but it's over 33 hours long!
-Lana_Maskus
"Mantel's writing is so exact and brilliant that, in itself, it seems an act of survival, even redemption." ―The New Yorker
"Brilliant, edgy historical fiction that captures the whiplash flux of the French Revolution with crisp immediacy on the page." ―The Seattle Times
"An epic of extraordinary detail and depth ... [it] moves beyond the realm of an absorbing yarn into the arena of a literary masterpiece." ―Booklist
This information about A Place of Greater Safety was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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