Axon Family Books in Order

The Axon Family books bring together two of Hilary Mantel's earliest novels, Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. Set in 1970s and 1980s England, they mix social realism with very dark comedy, all orbiting the strange household of Evelyn and Muriel Axon.

In Every Day is Mother's Day, widowed spiritualist Evelyn lives with her adult daughter Muriel in a filthy, barricaded semi detached house. Evelyn insists that the voices she hears are spirits, and treats Muriel as both burden and channel. When social worker Isabel Field is assigned to the case, she finds a family that resists every attempt at help, even as a secret pregnancy and a missing set of case notes build toward disaster.

Around the Axons, Mantel sketches a network of neighbours, colleagues and relatives whose lives quietly intersect. Isabel is having an affair with Colin Sidney, a weary history teacher whose own family is tied to Evelyn's séances. Petty squabbles, small deceptions and casual cruelty pile up, making the final act both shocking and oddly inevitable.

Vacant Possession returns to the same people roughly a decade later. Muriel has been released from a psychiatric institution under a community care scheme and is determined to take revenge on those she blames for locking her away. Using disguise, mimicry and careful observation, she insinuates herself into the homes of Isabel, Colin and others, slowly turning their ordinary routines inside out.

Together the two novels trace how damage echoes through families, streets and offices. Mantel is interested in the gap between what professionals think they are doing and what their clients experience, in the thin line between care and control, and in the way people cling to respectability even as their lives tip into farce.

The tone is often bleakly funny. Ghosts may or may not be real, but superstition, class prejudice and long buried shame feel like forces of their own. If you read the books in order you can watch characters age, change jobs and repeat their mistakes, and you can see early versions of the sharp observation and institutional satire that run through Mantel's later work.