The Mirror & the Light

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The brilliant #1 New York Times bestseller

Named a best book of 2020 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Guardian, and many more

With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with her peerless, Booker Prize-winning novels, 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.

The story begins in 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, 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, a man with only his wits to rely on, 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 the breaking point, Cromwell's robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. All of England lies at his feet, ripe for innovation and religious reform. But as fortune's wheel turns, Cromwell's enemies are gathering in the shadows. The inevitable question remains: how long can anyone survive under Henry's cruel and capricious gaze

Eagerly awaited and eight years in the making, The Mirror & the Light completes Cromwell's journey from self-made man to one of the most feared, influential figures of his time. Portrayed by Mantel with pathos and terrific energy, Cromwell is as complex as he is unforgettable: a politician and a fixer, a husband and a father, a man who both defied and defined his age.

Reviews

The Wolf Hall trilogy is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade. --The New York Times Book Review

The Mirror & the Light is the triumphant capstone to Mantel's trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to become the consigliere of Henry VIII...The world is blotted out as you are enveloped in the sweep of a story rich with conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology.... Mantel is often grouped with writers of historical fiction, [but] the more apt, and useful, comparison might be with Robert Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, the great anatomizer of political power. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

The searing finale of Hilary Mantel's magnificent trilogy...Mantel is clear-eyed yet compassionate in depicting her coldly calculating, covertly idealistic protagonist and the equally complex people he encounters in his rise and fall from power. Dense with resonant metaphors and alive with discomfiting ideas, The Mirror & the Light provides a fittingly Shakespearean resolution to Mantel's magisterial work. --The Washington Post

Wolf Hall, a decade ago, was a sensational character study that electrified an often-visited slice of history. The Mirror & the Light marks a triumphant end to a spellbinding story. --NPR

Cromwell [has] a depth at once Shakespearean and modernist. He could be Hamlet, or the title character of one of Freud's case studies...The dissolution of Cromwell coincides with his unmooring in time... One moment he is sucked into his childhood; the next, he is hurled into the sphere of the angels. -- Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic

Breathtaking...The plot here is shaped as meticulously as any thriller.... With this trilogy, 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. Someone give the Booker Prize judges the rest of the year off. --Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian

Is it as good as the first two books Yes. Is it a masterpiece Yes...Mantel may be unique among modern novelists in her ability to make the past as viscerally compelling as the present. A sensualist, she re-creates an age rife with beauty and dread...She re-creates the wicked, bawdy humor of the age, and her action scenes rival Shakespeare. She is an intricate and flawless plotter...But her overriding genius is for characterization. --The Los Angeles Times

A masterpiece...A novel of epic proportions [that is] every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors...The trilogy is complete and it is magnificent. --Alexandra Harris, The Guardian

Brilliant... From that opening sentence--'Once the queen's head is severed, he walks away'--axes and the shadow of death are everywhere...Mantel takes what is known of Cromwell--his meteoric rise, his autodidactic scholarship, his reformist tendencies--and weaves them into a masterful portrait of a man at mid-life, facing up to his past. --The Boston Globe

The entire trilogy is a brilliant engagement with the exercise and metaphysics of power in 16th-century Europe, an age in which sovereignty was understood to be divinely conferred, channeled through blood...Ms. Mantel has wonderfully conjured the mentality, materiality and channels of power in a vanished age...It is Ms. Mantel's depiction of Cromwell's inner workings, so credibly and vividly imagined, that make the work great, as do the characters she summons. --The Wall Street Journal

A stunning capstone to an epic that's both engrossing history and an unsurpassed literary achievement...The Mirror & the Light is a diadem of riches, binding together the complex pieces of Cromwell's character while leading inexorably toward the scaffold. With the trilogy now complete, Mantel cements her position as one of our greatest literary stylists and innovators. --Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Majestic and often breathtakingly poetic...What The Mirror & the Light offers--even more than the two previous volumes--is engulfing, total sensory immersion in a world...As with the most powerful and enduring historical fictions, the book grips the reader most tightly when, as is often the case, the writing comes as close to poetry as prose ever may. --Simon Schama, The Financial Times

A masterpiece...A novel of epic proportions [that is] every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors...The trilogy is complete and it is magnificent." --Alexandra Harris, The Guardian

"Deep, suspenseful, chewy, complex and utterly transporting--truly a full banquet. Most miraculously of all, it's every bit as good as the first two books, both of which won the Booker Prize. Imagine if the third The Godfather movie had been just as magnificent as the first two: It's like that. A perfectly executed masterpiece." --Elizabeth Gilbert, The Wall Street Journal Magazine

These novels are sure to be among the books that endure from the early decades of this century...In a novel that could travel far on character and plot, Mantel adds the accelerant of gorgeous language...We are in strange territory, an era that can feel very foreign...But what is not strange--what is achingly familiar and acutely relevant--is the way Mantel meticulously unfolds to us the nature of the human heart, all the old unchanging lusts, avarices, jealousies, hatreds and loves, the desire to live, the fear of death. --Geraldine Brooks, Air Mail

This is rich, full-bodied fiction. Indeed, it might well be the best of the trilogy simply because there is more of it, a treasure on every page...The brisk, present-tense narration makes you feel as though you are watching these long-settled events live, via a shaky camera phone... Mantel has...elevated historical fiction as an art form... At a time when the general movement of literature has been towards the margins, she has taken us to the dark heart of history. --The Times (London)

Fascinating...What Mantel does, often brilliantly, is put movement and muscle on the bare bones of what's known...[Cromwell's] bundled contradictions--a polyglot scholar with bruised knuckles, as ruthless in business as he was benevolent at home--are more than mirror and light; they're real, indelible life. --Entertainment Weekly

The Mirror & the Light [features] the embroiled, ruthless, visionary hero of Mantel's masterwork trilogy, the endlessly compelling Thomas Cromwell...Every page is rich with insight, the soul-deep characterization and cutting observational skill that make Mantel's trilogy such a singular accomplishment. --USA Today

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...As Cromwell approaches his end, cast off by an ungrateful master, Mantel pulls together the strands of his life into a sublime tapestry. --The Telegraph (UK)

Cromwell is a character for the ages...The stunning success of the novels is in large part the result of Ms. Mantel's skill in fashioning a voice and persona that, while never anachronistic, make Cromwell seem eerily contemporary...Mantel's genius is to make his 16th-century instincts, such as a willingness to decapitate anyone standing in his path, seem as plausible as his more familiar qualities. --The Economist

"The Mirror & the Light bears the stamp of Mantel's genius; it's a richly hued mural of meticulous research, enthralling characters, and expressionistic language. She is our literary Michelangelo. In Cromwell, a striver who will do anything to survive, she lets us glimpse the invention of modernity. Teeming with pageantry, intrigue, sex, and salvation, The Mirror & the Light reflects the looming tensions of every era, between those who hoard power and those who crave it." --O Magazine

Mantel's prose is rich and vivid...Mantel makes the past feel so immediate that it seems possible Cromwell might actually manage to save himself...Expectations are high for this novel. And it lives up to them. --Vox

"Beautifully written...The book makes for compulsive reading; if it doesn't win its author her third Booker Prize, there's no justice." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Brilliant.... Mantel enthralls with her descriptions of royal life, from its bizarre rites and traditions to its practicalities.... Her research is prodigious, her skill at complex plotting breathtaking, but her greatest strength is her characters and the dialogue she imagines for them." --Tampa Bay Times

"This huge canvas, expertly painted as always, offers many of the pleasures you've come to expect of Mantel and her Cromwell books...Cromwell's execution [is] a brilliantly imagined moment." --The New Yorker

Another masterpiece of historical fiction...The Mirror & the Light is superb, right to the last crimson drop...A complex, insightful exploration of power, sex, loyalty, friendship, religion, class and statecraft...A stunning conclusion to one of the great trilogies of our times. --Independent (UK)

Mantel's prose is steadily and quietly luminous, occasionally delivering unforgettable surprises...This is a

Author Bio

Hilary Mantel is the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize for her best-selling novels, Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Both novels have been translated into more than 35 languages, and sales for both books have reached over 5 million copies worldwide. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost. In 2014 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.