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"This riveting historical novel" (The New Yorker) is the story of three young provincials of no great heritage who together helped to destroy a way of life and, in the process, destroyed themselves: Camille Desmoulins, bisexual and beautiful, charming, erratic, untrustworthy; Georges Jacques Danton, hugely but erotically ugly, a brilliant pragmatist who knew how to seize power and use it; and Maximilien Robespierre, "the rabid lamb," who would send his dearest friend to the guillotine. Each, none older than thirty-four, would die by the hand of the very revolution he had helped to bring into being.

"The recent book that best captures the character and import of the Revolution for our time is...a novel...Hilary Mantel's 'A Place of Greater Safety' appeared in 1992 to high acclaim in the author's native Great Britain, where she is recognized as one of the best younger novelists at work today....In it...the French Revolution and its claims on our attention and expectation come back to life, as real and unresolved and critical as ever....Mantel...understands as a novelist that rather than simply exhibiting her views, she has an obligation to give her characters and their situation a specific reality of their own: this is the moral realism, as distinct from mere lifelikeness, that corresponds to the formal particularity of true art, and its powers, even when pessimistically informed, are never less than liberating....Hilary Mantel does not minimize the catastrophe of revolutionary hope--indeed, she chronicles it with unflinching thoroughness--but she does not betray that hope either. In our own ugly times, that is itself a hopeful sign."

Edwin Frank, Boston Book Review, Summer 1995

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