Overview

Soon to be a major TV series The Sunday Times bestseller Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Booker Prize ‘It is a book not read, but lived’ Telegraph ‘Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history … and what a show’ The Times The Sunday Times bestselling sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy. ‘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 • A Sunday Times Book of the Year • A New Statesman Book of the Year • A Spectator Book of the Year Sunday Times Bestseller (08/03/2020)

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9780008366735

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Reviews

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 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

Author Information

Dame Hilary Mantel was one of the greatest English novelists of our time, best known for her epic The Wolf Hall Trilogy. She won the Man Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies, which also won the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. The conclusion of the trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was an instant number one bestseller and winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, which she had also won for Wolf Hall. Mantel is the author of fourteen other acclaimed books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

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