He is afraid of a sudden noise that might startle someone below. But though the window is heavy, and sometimes shudders in its frame, the sash slides smoothly upwards. He need not fret. The gardens are empty. But over in the hospital, beyond the fences and shrubs, there is movement. They are beginning to come out: not the official party, but a gaggle of nurses in their aprons and caps.

I felt the conflict was such a waste. You can ask, “After nearly 30 years of the Troubles, what did everyone get with the Good Friday agreements?” After all the horrendous violence it was something similar to what was offered by the British government in the Sunningdale agreement from 1973. But that was rejected by pretty much everyone in Northern Ireland on both sides.Writing short stories has provided Mantel with a break from Cromwell, although she said she expected to complete The Mirror and the Light, the third instalment of her trilogy, next year. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies won the Man Booker prize in 2009 and 2012 respectively. Comma’ more fully explores what nostalgia does to us. It looks at how local stories develop into urban legends – the existence of the ‘animal wrapped in a blanket’ at a large home that is strictly off-limits to the local children, and how a story about a looked-down-upon neighbour spat in a stew offered as an act of charity has continued to be told and assumed legendary status: And in the title story, a chilling, fable-like “counterfactual” set in 1983 — in which a sniper plans to assassinate Margaret Thatcher from a window as she leaves a private hospital where she’s just had eye surgery (the real Thatcher did have exactly such surgery in 1983, but died of natural causes in 2013) — it will be hard for younger non-Brits to work out why references to Thatcher’s “handbag” can still sound so noirishly hilarious, or why the nameless assassin’s contemptuous mention of the way the Iron Lady “toddles” about in public should so immediately and ghoulishly conjure the lady, in all her steely, handbag-gripping, lower-middle-class glory. I tried to show the reader what these people were experiencing and how things looked to them,” he said. When the telephone rang, it made us both jump. I broke off what I was saying. ''Answer that,'' he said. ''It will be for me.''

Every other story here makes a permanent dent in a reader's consciousness because of Mantel's striking language and plots twists, as well as the Twilight Zone-type mood she summons up. Mantel is drawn to grotesque characters and surreal situations even when writing, as she does here, of the modern world. Although they're miles apart in terms of style, I think she has a lot in common with Nathanael West, whose novels like Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust caught people behaving at their worst and laughed. You know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller when, as here, some curious yet minor verbal oddity, some seeming rhetorical blip, turns out to be so cunningly related to a story’s metaphoric unfolding. True, there’s much more to “Comma” than I’ve let on: Mantel’s subtle depiction of the juvenile narrator’s relationship with sexy, wayward Mary; a couple of brilliant scenes involving the girls’ mothers; the chilling punctuation joke with which the story concludes. But, as with Edgar Allan Poe’s trademark tarns— those dark stagnant bodies of water mentioned in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and so many other Poe tales — the brown, lolling blebs of the Hathaways’ house might stand as an emblem of Mantel’s distinctive expertise: her ability to amplify mood and meaning through an eerie ramification of terms, her fine-tuned sensitivity (at times almost occult) to things sleek and dark and off-kilter. Yes, the images she deploys have a fairy-tale rightness about them in the moment (not that this makes them any less creepy), but they also have their roles to play, ineluctably, in some larger and unusually mordant verbal fantasia. The badly damaged Grand hotel in Brighton after an IRA bomb exploded in the building during the 1984 Conservative party conference. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images Mantel is unfazed at the prospect of further fuss over the Thatcher story. "As a writer you have a choice to make – are you going to accept censorship or not? In the case of the duchess, the great outraged weren't at the lecture and didn't read the article.I never cared where I stayed as long as it was clean and warm. I had of course stayed in places that were neither. The winter before there had been a guesthouse in a suburb of Leicester with a smell so repellent that when I woke at dawn I was unable to stay in the room longer than it took me to dress.’ I stood by the kettle while it boiled. I wondered: has the eye surgery been a success? When she comes out, will she be able to see as normal? Will they have to lead her? Will her eyes be bandaged? At any rate its counterpart, at the other end of the book, is based ( by Mantel's own account) in something more like wishful thinking. This time the intruder is an IRA assassin whom the narrator has mistaken for a plumber, and who wants to use the window of her flat to take a shot at Margaret Thatcher (this is also set in the 80s). One journalist said Ian MacGregor, the newspaper's weekend editor, read the story this week and "went ballistic", with the paper believing its readers would be upset by the title alone, let alone the sentiments behind it.