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From the acclaimed author of THE GIANT, O'BRIEN, the true story of a woman's fatal obsession with the French Revolutionary. In the city of Danzig in the summer of 1935, the emaciated body of a young woman was found in the storeroom of a lycee. It was a room seven feet by fifteen, furnished with a table, a basin, a stool and stove, and a cabinet holding books and manuscripts. This woman was Stanislawa Przybyszewska, thirty-four years old and a self-proclaimed genius. With no friends left to help her, she had run out of food and the morphine upon which she depended, and slowly wasted away. Brilliant, cultured and well-connected, Stasia had wrecked her life in the pursuit of an obsession. The official cause of death was tuberculosis; a more accurate diagnosis would be 'Robespierre'. Her sole purpose in life had become to write a novel that could truly capture the life of the French Revolutionary leader, with whom she had fallen in love. In telling Stasia's story, Hilary Mantel traces the anatomy of an obsession. In doing so she explores the relationship between a writer and their subject, and the dangerous powers of the historical imagination.
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