In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, "I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly." This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next. Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.