



The Mirror and the Light
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4.4 • 287 Ratings
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Now a major TV series
The Sunday Times bestseller
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
‘It is a book not read, but lived’ Telegraph
‘Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history … and what a show’ The Times
‘If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?’
The Mirror & the Light begins after the death of Anne Boleyn. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son has knocked down everyone in his path: established at the right hand of Henry VIII, he is the second man in England. But what will you do, an astute witness asks, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?
Heralded as the greatest English novels of this century, the Wolf Hall trilogy has won two Booker Prizes and been adapted into hugely successful stage plays. The first two books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, were transformed into a BAFTA- and Golden Globe-winning BBC television series, starring Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis. The cast now returns in the long-awaited concluding series, Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light.
A Guardian Book of the Year • A Times Book of the Year • A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year • A Sunday Times Book of the Year • A New Statesman Book of the Year • A Spectator Book of the Year
Sunday Times Bestseller (08/03/2020)
About the author
Dame Hilary Mantel was one of the greatest English novelists of our time, best known for her epic The Wolf Hall Trilogy. She won the Man Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies, which also won the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. The conclusion of the trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was an instant number one bestseller and winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, which she had also won for Wolf Hall. Mantel is the author of fourteen other acclaimed 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Hilary Mantel’s Inside Story: “The Mirror and the Light is the final part of my Wolf Hall trilogy, which centres on the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell. Born obscurely, Cromwell rose to become the right-hand man of Henry VIII and occupied the great offices of state during the most violent and dramatic years of his reign. In Wolf Hall, we followed Cromwell’s rise to power. In Bring Up the Bodies, he navigated the critical days leading to the execution of the king’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. The new book begins at the moment Anne’s head falls. We follow his further rise and rise, until the blacksmith’s son becomes an earl. Now, every day is a crisis, and the reader has a close-up view of his struggles with populist rebels, aristocratic enemies—and his boss, the monstrous king himself. Cromwell was a complex and clever man, and the fact that he’s so hard to understand made him a brilliant subject for a long novel sequence. You never seem to exhaust or grasp him; all the same, in concluding his story, I mean to give the reader a sharp sense of what it was like to watch through his eyes as the gruesome saga of his times unfolds.”
Customer Reviews
Loved it.
Read it and you will too.
M&TL
The end of the trilogy, when Cromwell’s finger is no longer on the pulse, control has slipped away and he doesn’t even realise it is something that will stay forever. Mantel’s treatment of his downfall, from his perspective, is brilliant.