The Wolf Hall Picture Book

(Hardback)

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Description

A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantels bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy
At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it. The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writers head. This book has made some of them visible. Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel, Ben Miles, the stages celebrated Thomas Cromwell, and his brother, photographer George Miles, spent many years exploring the locations we know Thomas Cromwell visited and inhabited Putney, Austin Friars, Wolf Hall, the Tower of London to capture the faint traces of Tudor England and his extraordinary life. Accompanied with extracts from The Wolf Hall Trilogy, some of them published here for the first time, and including a stunning new essay by its author, these photographs reveal a world that is shadowy, frightening, sometimes whimsical a portrait of a country in conversation with its past.

The present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released. Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives Guardian

Reviews

Praise for the Wolf Hall trilogy

The most masterful story telling imaginable Graham Norton

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

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

So original and disconcerting that it will surely come to be seen as a paradigm-shifter Sunday Telegraph

Hers are books that refuse to shy away from the underside of life Hilary Mantel is one of our bravest as well as our most brilliant writers Olivia Laing, Observer

It is the making of our English world, and who can fail to be stirred by it Helen Dunmore, author of Birdcage Walk

Succeeds brilliantly in every particle its an imaginative achievement to exhaust superlatives Spectator

Mantel in the voice of Cromwell is inspired. When she is in full flow as a novelist, creating scenes and inventing dialogue, she is more convincing than rendering a recorded scene from history Philippa Gregory, Sunday Express

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.