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Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
In Beyond Black, Alison Hart is a medium, a very large and unassuming woman traveling around the London suburbs, passing inconsequential messages from the dead to the living. She's accompanied by Colette, who is both attracted to and repulsed by her. Colette tries to control Alison's life, but she's competing against the dead who haunt Alison. These are men who knew her prostitute mother and are as cruel and demonic in death as they were in life. Alison had known from her dead visitors about the death of Princess Diana and the attacks on the World Trade Towers, and the future she's shown for the suburbs she roams looks bleak and hopeless as well. To find any semblance of peace, Alison must move past the terrors that lived with her in her mother's house when she was a child so she can deal with them in the afterlife too. Hilary Mantel's novel has received positive reviews with The Independent calling it "laceratingly observant, a masterpiece of wit, heavy with atmosphere. It is also glorious, insolent and slyly funny: full of robust, uncluttered prose and searing moments."
