Shortlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction 2020 The long-awaited sequel
to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary
Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy. 'A masterpiece'
Guardian 'It is a book not read, but lived' Telegraph 'Her Cromwell novels
are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century' Observer
'If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?' England,
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, Thomas
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 is a man with only
his wits to rely on; he 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 breaking point, Cromwell's robust
imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a
nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually
unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell,
when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close
to him? With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant
close the trilogy she began with 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.