The Mirror and the Light (The Wolf Hall Trilogy)

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The Sunday Times bestseller

Shortlisted for the Womens 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 Mantels 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 blacksmiths son from Putney emerges from the springs 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 Henrys regime to breaking point, Cromwells 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 mans 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)

Reviews

Hilary Mantels Wolf Hall novels make 99 per cent of contemporary literary fiction feel utterly pale and bloodless by comparison The Times

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

The most masterful story telling imaginable Graham Norton

The final book in the trilogy charts [Cromwells] inexorable downfall with the dark brilliance and profound humanity that makes it, like its forerunners, a masterpiece Daily Mail

Ambitious, compassionate, clear-eyed yet emotional, passionate and pragmatic, The Mirror & the Light lays down a marker for historical fiction that will set the standard for generations to come Independent

Its the crowning glory of a towering achievement Mail on Sunday

This is a must-read Good Housekeeping

On closing the book I wept as Ive not wept over a novel since I was a child . . . Mantel struck her spear against the flint of Thomas Cromwell, and lit such a candle in England as will never go out
Telegraph, Sarah Perry,

A masterpiece . . . Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of . . . Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century Observer, Stephanie Merritt

Author Bio

Hilary Mantel is the author of fourteen 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. Her two most recent novels, Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies, have both been awarded the Man Booker Prize - an unprecedented achievement.