Hilary Mantel

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

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.--us.macmillan.com

New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied.Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years“The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me.”In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children.Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to “write herself into being”―one novel after another. This wry and visceral memoir will certainly bring new converts to Mantel’s dark genius.“Mesmerizing.”― The New York Times

Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 0805090037 (ISBN13: 9780805090031)Though he battled for years to marry her, Henry VIII has become disenchanted with the audacious Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son, and her sharp intelligence and strong will have alienated his old friends and the noble families of England.When the discarded Katherine, Henry's first wife, dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice, setting in motion a dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over a few terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally himself with his enemies. What price will he pay for Annie's head?

Capturing the violence, tragedy, history, and drama of the French Revolution, this novel focuses on the families and loves of three men who led the Revolution--Danton, the charismatic leader and orator; Robespierre, the cold rationalist; and Desmoulins, the rabble-rouser.

HILARY MANTEL is one of Britain's most accomplished and acclaimed writers. In these ten bracingly transgressive tales, all her gifts of characterisation and observation are fully engaged, ushering concealed horrors into the light. Childhood cruelty is played out behind the bushes in 'Comma'; nurses clash in 'Harley Street' over something more than professional differences; and in the title story, staying in for the plumber turns into an ambiguous and potentially deadly waiting game.Whether set in a claustrophobic Saudi Arabian flat or on a precarious mountain road on a Greek island, these stories share an insight into the darkest recesses of the spirit. Displaying all of Mantel's unmistakable style and wit, they reveal a great writer at the peak of her powers.

Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever.This is Hilary Mantel at her finest--insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read.

A two-ebook edition of Hilary Mantel' s bestselling novels: Wolf Hall, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009, and Bring Up the Bodies, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012.Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the first two instalments in Hilary Mantel' s Tudor trilogy, have gathered readers and praise in equal and enormous measure. They have been credited with elevating historical fiction to new heights and animating a period of history many thought too well known to be made fresh.Through the eyes and ears of Thomas Cromwell, the books' narrative prism, we are shown Tudor England, the court of King Henry VIII. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events.In Wolf Hall we witness Cromwell' s rise, beginning as clerk to Cardinal Wolsey, Henry' s chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. He is soon to become his successor. By 1535, when the action of Bring Up the Bodies begins, Cromwell is Chief Minister to Henry, his fortunes having risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry' s second wife. Anne' s days, though, are marked. Cromwell watches as the king falls in love with silent, plain Jane Seymour, sensing what Henry' s affection will mean for his queen, for England, and for himself.

This is a previously-published edition of ISBN 9780007172894.One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin-or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. No matter how copiously Father Angwin drinks while he confesses his broken faith, the level of the bottle does not drop. Although Fludd does not appear to be eating, the food on his plate disappears. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action. Knitting together the miraculous and the mundane, the dreadful and the ludicrous, Fludd is a tale of alchemy and transformation told with astonishing art, insight, humor, and wit.

A CHANGE OF CLIMATE [Paperback] Mantel, Hilary

Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, a maker of maps, but when her husband's work takes her to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map the Kingdom's areas of internal darkness. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive, watchful. The streets are not a woman's territory; confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self begin to dissolve. She hears whispers, sounds of distress from the 'empty' flat above her head. She has only rumours, no facts to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease. As her days empty of certainty and purpose, her life becomes a blank -- waiting to be filled by violence and disaster.

Hilary Mantel's seventh novel examines the pressures on women during the 1960s to excel--but not be too successful--in England's complex hierarchy of class and status. Pushed by a domineering mother, Carmel McBain climbs her way through the pecking order and ends up at London University as an acquiescent and undernourished teenager, achieving the status so desired by her mother, but too weak to make use of it or pose a threat to anyone. Though this is Carmel's story, it reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper.

Evelyn Axon is a medium by trade; her daughter, Muriel, is a half-wit by nature. Barricaded in their crumbling house, surrounded by the festering rubbish of years, they defy the curiosity of their neighbors and their social worker, Isabel Field. Isabel is young and inexperienced and has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders the streets, and a lover, Colin, who wants her to run away with him. But Colin has three horrible children and a shrill wife who is pregnant again; how is he going to run anywhere? As Isabel wrestles with her own problems, a horrible secret grows in the darkness of the Axon household. When at last it comes to light, the result is by turns hilarious and terrifying.

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the YearLos Angeles Times Best Book of the YearLondon, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. In the midst of it all is the Giant, O'Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in myths, fairies, miracles, and little people. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. O'Brien's opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter, who lusts after the Giant's corpse as a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge.In her acclaimed novel, two-time Man Booker Prize winning author Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of Ireland and England. As belief wrestles knowledge and science wrestles song, so The Giant, O'Brien calls to us from a fork in the road as a tale of time, and a timeless tale.

A dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall trilogy.In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, Learning to Talk is a collection of loosely autobiographical stories that locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.Absorbing and evocative, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the young narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In “King Billy Is a Gentleman,” the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. “Curved Is the Line of Beauty " is a story of friendship, faith and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In “Third Floor Rising, " she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed.“A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.” ― USA Today“Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.” ― The Washington Post

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books , she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next. Her subjects range far and Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britain’s last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her famous lecture, ‘Royal Bodies’, which caused a media frenzy, explores the place of royal women in society and our imagination. Here too are some of her LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and a confrontation with a circus strongman. Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.

Lock your doors, barricade your windows: Muriel Axon is back in town. It's been ten years since she was locked away for killing her mad old mother. Now she wants to lay Mother's ghost to rest and find her missing child. But above all, she wants revenge. Her former social worker and her old neighbours have made new lives, but Muriel, with her talent for disguise, will infiltrate their homes and exploit their talents for self-destruction, until at last all her enemies are brought together for a gruesome finale. Hilary Mantel's razor-sharp wit animates every page. This malevolent black comedy has as many twists and turns as a well-plotted thriller.

THE FINAL BOOK FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST WRITERSIn addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels—revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is her legendary essay “Royal Bodies,” on our endless fascination with the current royal family.From her unusual childhood to her all-consuming interest in Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel’s life in her own luminous words, through “messages from people I used to be.” Filled with her singular wit and wisdom, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.

New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy is the magnificent, riveting historical saga of the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, featuring Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Jane Seymour, and other political and royal players from Tudor England.The Man Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies served as the basis for the six-part BBC and PBS Masterpiece television series starring Academy Award-winner Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and The Crown's Emmy Award-winner Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn, and were adapted into award-winning and critically-acclaimed stage plays in London's West End and on Broadway."Dazzling... Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. Wolf Hall has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falcon-like...both spellbinding and believable."--The New York Times Book Review

Just after ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ author Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker for ‘Wolf Hall’, she fell gravely ill. This is her remarkable hospital diary. Originally published in the London Review of Books, this diary by the acclaimed author Hilary Mantel explores in forensic detail her loss of dignity, her determination, the concentration of the senses into an animalistic struggle to get through, and the attendant hallucinations she was plagued by during her stay in hospital. With her health now improved, and the acknowledgement of the Man Booker prize-winning follow-up to ‘Wolf Hall’, ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ as one of our greatest works of fiction, ‘Ink in the Blood’ remains a significant testament to the traumas of illness, and one of the most incredible and haunting essays published in a very long time.

Een veiliger oord. Vrijheid. Dit eerste deel gaat over de opmaat naar de Franse Revolutie: de lege staatskas; het onvermogen van de koning om die weer te vullen; zijn besluiteloosheid; de hongersnood en de idioot hoge broodprijzen; de onvrede onder de burgers; de weigering van de boeren om hun herendeel te vervullen; de steeds luider wordende roep van burgers om stemrecht. In deze explosieve sfeer groeien drie jongens op, die elkaar ontmoeten als ze gaan studeren in Parijs: Camille Desmoulins, Georges-Jacques Danton en Maximilien de Robespierre. Mantel schetst de jonge jaren van deze mannen, waar ze vandaan komen en hoe ze hun mening vormen in deze tumultueuze tijd, en laat zien hoe ze worden tot de personen zoals wij die nu kennen. Mantel beschrijft burgers en werklieden die niet langer genoegen nemen met de verdeeldheid van de standen en de oneerlijke rechtsstaat, en als lezer ervaar je dat alsof je waarnemer bent, en dat het logisch is om 'revolutie!' te roepen en met z’n allen naar de Bastille te gaan.

"She looked up and smiled. She had a face of feral sweetness, its color yellow; her eyes were long and dark, her mouth a taut bow, her nostrils upturned as if she were scenting the wind."In "How Shall I Know You?," a melancholic and ailing writer reluctantly travels east of London to give a lecture before a literary society. Mr. Simister, the organization's secretary, lures the world-weary novelist turned biographer with promises of a modest stipend and lodging at a charming bed-and-breakfast for her trouble. Nevertheless, on that rainy day she meets Mr. Simister at the train station, she wonders why she ever agreed to come in the first place. Driving past steel-shuttered windows and Day-Glo banners, Mr. Simister takes the writer to her hotel for the evening, which turns out to be crumbling and isolated rather than picturesque. As she crosses the threshold into the dank stench of Eccles House she is faced with the feral porter, Louise, and suffers through an evening that may be more than she bargained for.From Hilary Mantel's brilliant and darkly comic collection of contemporary stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, comes a tale told with her distinctive blend of subversive wit and gimlet-eyed characterization. "How Shall I Know You?" showcases the extraordinary genius of Hilary Mantel, called one of our "greatest living novelists" (NPR).

A new story from Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and twice winner of the Man Booker Prize.This story is also available in the paperback and eBook edition of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.‘Lastly,’ Mr Maddox said, ‘and to conclude our tour, we come to a very special part of the house.’ He paused, to impress on her that she was going to have a treat. ‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’‘The School of English’ invites us behind the stucco façade of a Notting Hill mansion where fear and cruelty grip a household.

A reading guide to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

De eerste doden zijn gevallen, de Revolutie is begonnen. Eén ding is zeker, de krachten die het volk drijven zijn onomkeerbaar. Vooralsnog bestaat de monarchie en leeft de koning en lijkt het volk te willen vasthouden aan die stand van zaken. Maar we weten hoe snel de stemming kan omslaan – naarmate honger groeit en wanhoop toeneemt – door een man, een mening, een woord.Desmoulins, Danton en Robespierre zijn inmiddels volwassen. Ze bevinden zich in het centrum van de gebeurtenissen, die zich razendsnel ontwikkelen. Niemand weet waar hij morgen zal staan en of dat nog aan de goede kant van de wet zal zijn, nu de wet dagelijks verandert. De lijn tussen slagen en falen is flinterdun, en falen is geen optie.

Frankrijk, 1792. De jonge Republiek wordt vanbinnen verscheurd door burgeroorlog en vanbuiten bedreigd door de grootmachten van Europa, die de monarchie met geweld willen herstellen. De Revolutie hangt aan een zijden draadje. In de oplopende spanning klinkt steeds luider de roep om daadkrachtig optreden van de overheid, totdat de Terreur niet meer te stoppen is.Botsten in Gelijkheid republikeinen en royalisten met elkaar, in Broederschap komt het tot een treffen tussen de wapenbroeders van het eerste onkreukbare idealist Robespierre en pragmatische levensgenieter Danton. Dantons manoeuvres maken hem rijk en kwetsbaar voor chantage. Robespierres rigide opvattingen maken hem machtig en angstaanjagend. Desmoulins, vriend van beiden, levert zijn messcherpe kritiek zonder aanzien des persoons en raakt verpletterd in de titanenstrijd, waarvan er maar één de overwinnaar kan zijn ...

Η Αγγλία των Τιδόρ τη δεκαετία του 1520 βρίσκεται στα πρόθυρα του χάους. Ο Ερρίκος Η΄ θέλει πάση θυσία να αποκτήσει γιο, ώστε να διασφαλίσει τη διαδοχή στο θρόνο και να αποφευχθεί η πιθανότητα του εμφύλιου πολέμου. Η Αικατερίνη της Αραγώνας, σύζυγός του επί δύο δεκαετίες, δεν του γέννησε διάδοχο· θέλει να ακυρώσει το γάμο του και να παντρευτεί την ερωμένη του Άννα Μπολέιν. Οι επιθυμίες του προσκρούουν στην αρνητική στάση του πάπα της Ρώμης, στάση για την οποία το τίμημα θα το πληρώσει αρχικά ο Λόρδος Καγκελάριος του Ερρίκου, ο περίφημος αρχιεπίσκοπος Γούλσι. Τον γόρδιο δεσμό καλείται να λύσει ο Τόμας Κρόμγουελ, δεξί χέρι του Γούλσι, που μετά την πτώση του προστάτη του θα κατορθώσει με τη σιδερένια του θέληση και τον πραγματισμό του όχι μόνο να επιβιώσει στη λυκοφωλιά της αυλής των Τιδόρ αλλά να γίνει ο άνθρωπος κλειδί της διακυβέρνησης του Ερρίκου.To Γουλφ Χολ είναι λοιπόν κυρίως η ιστορία της ανόδου του Κρόμγουελ. Γιος ενός ταπεινού σιδερά, θα δραπετεύσει από τη σκοτεινή ζωή της αγγλικής επαρχίας, θα πολεμήσει ως μισθοφόρος στη Γαλλία, θα ταξιδέψει στην Ιταλία, θα μάθει γλώσσες και θα διαπρέψει στο εμπόριο, και θα επιστρέψει στο Λονδίνο με την ιδιότητα του νομικού, έχοντας αποκτήσει τη φήμη του ανθρώπου που κανείς δεν θα τον ήθελε εχθρό του. Με όπλο τη θέληση και την ευφυΐα του κατορθώνει να σπάσει τα τεχνητά δεσμά τα οποία ορθώνει η ταπεινή του καταγωγή, και γίνεται ο ιθύνων νους της πολιτικής του βασιλιά του, συνδέει το όνομά του με την εισαγωγή της Μεταρρύθμισης στην Αγγλία και θέτει τις θεσμικές βάσεις για να μετεξελιχθεί η Αγγλία σε ένα σύγχρονο κράτος που ορίζει το ίδιο τη μοίρα του.Απόλυτος έλεγχος των πηγών, προσήλωση στην ιστορική αλήθεια, γλαφυρή ανασύσταση μιας πολυτάραχης ιστορικής περιόδου, πολυπρόσωπη αφήγηση που καθηλώνει, αριστοτεχνικό χτίσιμο των χαρακτήρων, ψυχολογική εμβάθυνση είναι ορισμένες από τις αρετές του έργου, που θεωρείται ήδη σταθμός στην εξέλιξη του ιστορικού μυθιστορήματος.Ο αναγνώστης δεν έχει μπροστά του απλώς ψυχρές περιγραφές γεγονότων, πραγμάτων και προσώπων, ούτε κάποια επίδειξη λόγιας πολυμάθειας εκ μέρους της συγγραφέως, αλλά ξετυλίγεται στα μάτια του ένας κόσμος που πάλλεται από ζωή, ένα σύμπαν που ξαναζωντανεύει σε κάθε πτυχή του.Η υποδοχή που επιφύλαξε η κριτική υπήρξε αποθεωτική για το μυθιστόρημα, το οποίο το 2009 απέσπασε μεταξύ άλλων το Βραβείο Man Booker, την κορυφαία διάκριση στο χώρο της αγγλόφωνης λογοτεχνίας, ενώ το 2010 τιμήθηκε με το Βραβείο Walter Scott για το Καλύτερο Ιστορικό Μυθιστόρημα.

Η Αγγλία των Τιδόρ τη δεκαετία του 1520 βρίσκεται στα πρόθυρα του χάους. Ο Ερρίκος Η΄ θέλει πάση θυσία να αποκτήσει γιο, ώστε να διασφαλίσει τη διαδοχή στο θρόνο και να αποφευχθεί η πιθανότητα του εμφύλιου πολέμου. Η Αικατερίνη της Αραγώνας, σύζυγός του επί δύο δεκαετίες, δεν του γέννησε διάδοχο· θέλει να ακυρώσει το γάμο του και να παντρευτεί την ερωμένη του Άννα Μπολέιν. Οι επιθυμίες του προσκρούουν στην αρνητική στάση του πάπα της Ρώμης, στάση για την οποία το τίμημα θα το πληρώσει αρχικά ο Λόρδος Καγκελάριος του Ερρίκου, ο περίφημος αρχιεπίσκοπος Γούλσι. Τον γόρδιο δεσμό καλείται να λύσει ο Τόμας Κρόμγουελ, δεξί χέρι του Γούλσι, που μετά την πτώση του προστάτη του θα κατορθώσει με τη σιδερένια του θέληση και τον πραγματισμό του όχι μόνο να επιβιώσει στη λυκοφωλιά της αυλής των Τιδόρ αλλά να γίνει ο άνθρωπος κλειδί της διακυβέρνησης του Ερρίκου.To Γουλφ Χολ είναι λοιπόν κυρίως η ιστορία της ανόδου του Κρόμγουελ. Γιος ενός ταπεινού σιδερά, θα δραπετεύσει από τη σκοτεινή ζωή της αγγλικής επαρχίας, θα πολεμήσει ως μισθοφόρος στη Γαλλία, θα ταξιδέψει στην Ιταλία, θα μάθει γλώσσες και θα διαπρέψει στο εμπόριο, και θα επιστρέψει στο Λονδίνο με την ιδιότητα του νομικού, έχοντας αποκτήσει τη φήμη του ανθρώπου που κανείς δεν θα τον ήθελε εχθρό του. Με όπλο τη θέληση και την ευφυΐα του κατορθώνει να σπάσει τα τεχνητά δεσμά τα οποία ορθώνει η ταπεινή του καταγωγή, και γίνεται ο ιθύνων νους της πολιτικής του βασιλιά του, συνδέει το όνομά του με την εισαγωγή της Μεταρρύθμισης στην Αγγλία και θέτει τις θεσμικές βάσεις για να μετεξελιχθεί η Αγγλία σε ένα σύγχρονο κράτος που ορίζει το ίδιο τη μοίρα του.Απόλυτος έλεγχος των πηγών, προσήλωση στην ιστορική αλήθεια, γλαφυρή ανασύσταση μιας πολυτάραχης ιστορικής περιόδου, πολυπρόσωπη αφήγηση που καθηλώνει, αριστοτεχνικό χτίσιμο των χαρακτήρων, ψυχολογική εμβάθυνση είναι ορισμένες από τις αρετές του έργου, που θεωρείται ήδη σταθμός στην εξέλιξη του ιστορικού μυθιστορήματος.Ο αναγνώστης δεν έχει μπροστά του απλώς ψυχρές περιγραφές γεγονότων, πραγμάτων και προσώπων, ούτε κάποια επίδειξη λόγιας πολυμάθειας εκ μέρους της συγγραφέως, αλλά ξετυλίγεται στα μάτια του ένας κόσμος που πάλλεται από ζωή, ένα σύμπαν που ξαναζωντανεύει σε κάθε πτυχή του.Η υποδοχή που επιφύλαξε η κριτική υπήρξε αποθεωτική για το μυθιστόρημα, το οποίο το 2009 απέσπασε μεταξύ άλλων το Βραβείο Man Booker, την κορυφαία διάκριση στο χώρο της αγγλόφωνης λογοτεχνίας, ενώ το 2010 τιμήθηκε με το Βραβείο Walter Scott για το Καλύτερο Ιστορικό Μυθιστόρημα.

A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantel’s 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 writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible .’ Hilary Mantel Hilary Mantel, Ben Miles, the stage’s 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 Hilary Mantel's book 'The Mirror and the Light' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 10-05-2021.