“The Wolf Hall trilogy is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Nominated for the Booker Prize
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
Named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, The Telegraph (UK), The Times Literary Supplement, Kirkus Reviews, Star Tribune (Minneapolis), NPR, The Independent, and USA Today
A Star Tribune (Minneapolis) holiday book recommendation
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With the new trade paperback release of The Mirror & the Light (on sale May 4), 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, and offers 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hilary Mantel, a two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is the author of the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. The trilogy’s novels—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & the Light—have been translated into thirty-seven languages, and their sales have reached over six million copies worldwide. She is the author of sixteen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and the short-story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.
“The searing finale of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent trilogy . . . Mantel is clear-eyed yet compassionate in depicting her coldly calculating, covertly idealistic protagonist and the equally complex people he encounters in his rise and fall from power. Dense with resonant metaphors and alive with discomfiting ideas, The Mirror & the Light provides a fittingly Shakespearean resolution to Mantel’s magisterial work.” —The Washington Post
“This is rich, full-bodied fiction. Indeed, it might well be the best of the trilogy simply because there is more of it, a treasure on every page . . . The brisk, present-tense narration makes you feel as though you are watching these long-settled events live, via a shaky camera phone . . . Mantel has . . . elevated historical fiction as an art form . . . At a time when the general movement of literature has been towards the margins, she has taken us to the dark heart of history.” —The Times (London)
“Majestic and often breathtakingly poetic . . . What The Mirror & the Light offers—even more than the two previous volumes—is engulfing total sensory immersion in a world . . . As with the most powerful and enduring historical fictions, the book grips the reader most tightly when, as is often the case, the writing comes as close to poetry as prose ever may.” —Financial Times