Hilary Mantel’s truly great novel peels back history to explore the rich intersection of individual psychology and wider politics in Tudor England.

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 oppose him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Son of a brutal blacksmith, Cromwell is a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer. He has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power and is prepared to break some more.

"[Mantel] has reversed the appeal of these towering rivals of the Tudor period, that fecund breeding ground of British historical fiction as the American Civil War is of ours … Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel — tolerant, passionate, intellectually inquisitive, humane. We follow his winding quest in vivid present-tense flashbacks, drawn up from his own prodigious memory … Although Mantel adopts none of the archaic fustian of so many historical novels — the capital letters, the antique turns of phrase — her book feels firmly fixed in the 16th century … 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 falconlike."  -  Christopher Benley, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Hilary Mantel has won the Booker Prize twice - with Wolf Hall (2009), and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) - becoming only the third novelist – after J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey – to scoop it twice. In a varied writing career, Mantel, who was made a dame in 2014, has detailed her serious health issues with endometriosis, ghosts (she once lived in a former mental asylum in Surrey), and the French Revolution, as well as Thomas Cromwell.