A Place of Greater Safety (1992)

The French Revolution becomes a web of households, friendships, debts and institutions through Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins. Mantel stays with what happens when people who can argue for justice must exercise power over one another. A long, crowded historical novel for the movement from revolutionary promise to governing and the Terror. Its intimate motives are a novelist's reconstruction of real figures, making it useful for discussion without mistaking the dialogue for evidence.