This book is the first comprehensive critical introduction to the life and career of one of the most significant authors of the contemporary period. Moving beyond the straightforwardly biographical, the study provides an account of Hilary Mantel's corpus which demonstrates the complex relationship that exists in the author's writing between history and fiction, source and story, and memory and making. Responding to the elliptical and self-reflexive nature of Mantel's body of work, the book rejects a chronological approach to the author's writing career in favour of tracing a series of thematic concerns which can be seen to structure her literary output across a diverse array of genres and forms: alchemy, the body, haunting, history, and the figure of the reader. Drawing on unpublished materials held in the Hilary Mantel Literary Papers at the Huntington Library, and woven through with illustrations of the ways in which a range of theoretical concepts can be seen to resonate within the author's work, Hilary Mantel offers a simultaneously accessible and rigorous account of a writer whose significance in, and influence upon, contemporary literary culture is yet to be fully acknowledged.