I like and admire Hilary Mantel's work very much; this is worth reading, but it isn't her best book, I think. For such a slim volume, it's trying to do too much and it collapses a bit under the weight of all its ideas: the seemingly clear but actually impossibly fuzzy line between freakishness/abnormality and normalcy; the scientific urge to understand the world by taking it apart; the limits of knowledge; the power and, ultimately, the limits of storytelling as a way of understanding and enduring the world; the predatory relationships between people in a world governed by the cash nexus; fighting and submitting to the accidents of birth.... I could keep going. So it's interesting but can't quite keep all these balls in the air. But better to be too ambitious than too safe, right?