The Wolf Hall Trilogy - Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light (The Wolf Hall Trilogy): Abridged edition
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012
Winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2012
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2013
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2009
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2009
‘A masterpiece’ Guardian
‘It is a book not read, but lived’ Telegraph
‘Her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century’ Observer
‘If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?’
England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour.
Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?
With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.
A Guardian Book of the Year • A Times Book of the Year • A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
Praise for Wolf Hall: -
”'Dizzyingly, dazzlingly good . . . Hugely exciting, packed full of power struggles and political machinations, but also delightfully poetic, vivid in image and phrase. A rich and subtle wonder” - Daily Mail
”'Beautifully written and terrifying fiction. She makes that world so concrete you can smell the rain-drenched wool cloaks and feel the sharp fibres of rushes underfoot. It’s a world of marvels” - Daily Telegraph
”'As soon as I opened this book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret the story was over, a regret I still feel” - The Times
Praise for Bring Up the Bodies: -
”'The greatest modern English prose writer writing today” - Peter Stothard, Chairman of the 2012 Man Booker Prize
”'In another league. This ongoing story of Henry VIII’s right-hand man is the finest piece of historical fiction I have ever read . . . A staggering achievement” - Sunday Telegraph
”'Darkly magnificent . . . the finest work of historical fiction in contemporary literature” - Washington Post
Praise for The Mirror and the Light: -
”'Hilary Mantel has written an epic of English history that does what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians. We are lucky to have it.” - Sunday Telegraph
”'Very few writers manage not just to excavate the sedimented remains of the past, but bring them up again into the light and air so that they shine brightly once more before us. Hilary Mantel has done just that.” - Simon Schama, Financial Times
”'A masterpiece that will keep yielding its riches, changing as its readers change, going forward with us into the future” - Guardian
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