Obsessed with... a nasty little short story from Hilary Mantel

I'm currently adding my two penn'orth/cents to KQED Arts' new Obsessed feature, "a weekly series featuring everything the KQED Arts gang can’t stop talking about." My contribution to Mar 5's post:

My history nerd heart is most excited for the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor intrigue-a-thon Wolf Hall. To sate myself until its premiere on U.S. TV next month, I just re-read Mantel’s strangest, most compelling short story from her Assassination of Margaret Thatcher collection: “Winter Break.” Barely skirting 2,000 words, this nasty little shocker about a vacationing couple in their airport cab is what the phrase “sting in the tail” was invented for.


Her writing is typically flawless, but something’s up: its revisiting of the frequent Mantel theme of childlessness is so on-the-nose, the inevitable “gotcha” so blatant that I suspect (to borrow a line from one of my favorite guilty pleasures) it’s all “so overt it’s covert.” Even on second reading, I can’t quite work out exactly what Mantel is up to here, and I look forward to cracking it one day. Read “Winter Break” online!