The Mirror and the Light
by Hilary Mantel
🏆 Winner of the 2021 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
Recommendations from our site
“We start with an ending—Anne Boleyn’s head has just been severed. Nobody does an execution like Hilary Mantel…In The Mirror and The Light…the pace slowly but inexorably increases as the complications of Cromwell’s ambitions and responsibilities multiply. We know what the end will be, but the tension, the tension!” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“Mantel is the most deft and masterful of writers. Ominous foreshadowing is conveyed subtly by way of allusion, sideways glances, and deadpan asides; warnings are missed, mistakes are made, resentments build. Through Mantel’s eyes, the great anti-hero of English history is reinvented as a man of thought and care and canny, who plays his mercurial master like a lute, until he doesn’t. The fall, when it comes, is swift and merciless. Right until the final pages I was still guessing as to how it would unfold.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Mantel has twice triumphed at the Booker with the first two instalments of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. The third book, The Mirror and the Light, will chart Cromwell’s inevitable demise and its publication in March is inarguably the literary event of the year.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Notable New Novels of Early 2020
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“The trilogy is complete, and it is magnificent. The portrait of Thomas Cromwell that began with Wolf Hall (2009) and continued with Bring Up the Bodies (2012) now concludes with a novel of epic proportions, every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors.”
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