4th Estate

Yesterday’s release of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies was frenzied and wonderful, sparking a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that is impossible to capture in text. High streets across the country sparkled with red and gold, and twitter and Facebook hummed to the din of devoted fans. We’ve compiled a collage of photos and review extracts to give a little taster of this spectacular publishing event…

Thomas Penn interviews Hilary Mantel, The Telegraph: ‘There’s something lovely in being able to touch hands with the past in that way’

Hilary Mantel interviewed on The History Girls: ‘I actually like the constraints, enjoy solving the narrative problems that arise when you have strict guidelines of fact. One problem is that real life does not have a neat dramatic shape, so you have to find it’

Margaret Atwood, Guardian: ‘Literary invention does not fail her: she’s as deft and verbally adroit as ever’

Andrew Motion, The Times: ‘Bring Up The Bodies is a richly self-sufficient pleasure…Historical novel? Of course, and probably the best to be published since Wolf Hall’

James Wood, The New Yorker: ‘Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case … In short, this novelist has the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting.’

Rachel Syme, Time: ‘The massive popularity of Game of Thrones and its depiction of violent bloodlust for royal power makes Bring up the Bodies an especially culture-relevant read, but Mantel’s novel deals with more than just heads on spikes and lusting in back rooms. She moves beyond the gory legends and dives deeper, into the story of a man torn—between what is right and what he knows he must do—and how quickly one’s fate can change’

Thanks to all her fans for spreading the word on this fantastic sequel to the Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall. Follow us on twitter, or ‘like’ Hilary’s Facebook page to keep up to date with upcoming events and media features.

David Roth-Ey, Victoria Barnsley and Nicholas Pearson at the in-house launch celebrations