It’s fraught terrain, with an intricate and fascinating industrial history—yet famous, post-industrially, for nothing but the Moors murders and Harold Shipman. It’s where I grew up, and this must be the reason I bought the book when Jonathan Cape published it in 1989. I have an inability to fully believe in the village where I was born, and when I was a child, if I found it on a map, I would stare and stare, squashing the name under my finger: there it is in print, so it must be real.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 193