Hilary Mantel twice won the Booker Prize, for her best-selling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won critical acclaim around the globe. Mantel authored over a dozen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost
"The Wolf Hall trilogy is probably the greatest historical fiction
accomplishment of the past decade." --The New York Times Book
Review "The Mirror & the Light is the triumphant capstone to
Mantel's trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who
rose to become the consigliere of Henry VIII...The world is blotted
out as you are enveloped in the sweep of a story rich with
conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology.... Mantel is often
grouped with writers of historical fiction, [but] the more apt, and
useful, comparison might be with Robert Caro, the biographer of
Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, the great anatomizer of political
power." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"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 "Wolf Hall, a
decade ago, was a sensational character study that electrified an
often-visited slice of history. The Mirror & the Light marks a
triumphant end to a spellbinding story." --NPR "Cromwell [has] a
depth at once Shakespearean and modernist. He could be Hamlet, or
the title character of one of Freud's case studies...The
dissolution of Cromwell coincides with his unmooring in time... One
moment he is sucked into his childhood; the next, he is hurled into
the sphere of the angels." -- Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
"Breathtaking...The plot here is shaped as meticulously as any
thriller.... With this trilogy, Mantel has redefined what the
historical novel is capable of...Taken together, her Cromwell
novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this
century. Someone give the Booker Prize judges the rest of the year
off." --Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian
"Is it as good as the first two books? Yes. Is it a masterpiece?
Yes...Mantel may be unique among modern novelists in her ability to
make the past as viscerally compelling as the present. A
sensualist, she re-creates an age rife with beauty and dread...She
re-creates the wicked, bawdy humor of the age, and her action
scenes rival Shakespeare. She is an intricate and flawless
plotter...But her overriding genius is for characterization." --The
Los Angeles Times "A masterpiece...A novel of epic proportions
[that is] every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and
stupendously intelligent as its predecessors...The trilogy is
complete and it is magnificent." --Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
"Brilliant... From that opening sentence--'Once the queen's head is
severed, he walks away'--axes and the shadow of death are
everywhere...Mantel takes what is known of Cromwell--his meteoric
rise, his autodidactic scholarship, his reformist tendencies--and
weaves them into a masterful portrait of a man at mid-life, facing
up to his past." --The Boston Globe "The entire trilogy is a
brilliant engagement with the exercise and metaphysics of power in
16th-century Europe, an age in which sovereignty was understood to
be divinely conferred, channeled through blood...Ms. Mantel has
wonderfully conjured the mentality, materiality and channels of
power in a vanished age...It is Ms. Mantel's depiction of
Cromwell's inner workings, so credibly and vividly imagined, that
make the work great, as do the characters she summons." --The Wall
Street Journal "A stunning capstone to an epic that's both
engrossing history and an unsurpassed literary achievement...The
Mirror & the Light is a diadem of riches, binding together the
complex pieces of Cromwell's character while leading inexorably
toward the scaffold. With the trilogy now complete, Mantel cements
her position as one of our greatest literary stylists and
innovators." --Star Tribune (Minneapolis) "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." --Simon Schama, The Financial Times "A masterpiece...A
novel of epic proportions [that is] every bit as thrilling,
propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its
predecessors...The trilogy is complete and it is magnificent."
--Alexandra Harris, The Guardian "Deep, suspenseful, chewy, complex
and utterly transporting--truly a full banquet. Most miraculously
of all, it's every bit as good as the first two books, both of
which won the Booker Prize. Imagine if the third The Godfather
movie had been just as magnificent as the first two: It's like
that. A perfectly executed masterpiece." --Elizabeth Gilbert, The
Wall Street Journal Magazine "These novels are sure to be among the
books that endure from the early decades of this century...In a
novel that could travel far on character and plot, Mantel adds the
accelerant of gorgeous language...We are in strange territory, an
era that can feel very foreign...But what is not strange--what is
achingly familiar and acutely relevant--is the way Mantel
meticulously unfolds to us the nature of the human heart, all the
old unchanging lusts, avarices, jealousies, hatreds and loves, the
desire to live, the fear of death." --Geraldine Brooks, Air Mail
"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) "Fascinating...What Mantel does,
often brilliantly, is put movement and muscle on the bare bones of
what's known...[Cromwell's] bundled contradictions--a polyglot
scholar with bruised knuckles, as ruthless in business as he was
benevolent at home--are more than mirror and light; they're real,
indelible life." --Entertainment Weekly
"The Mirror & the Light [features] the embroiled, ruthless,
visionary hero of Mantel's masterwork trilogy, the endlessly
compelling Thomas Cromwell...Every page is rich with insight, the
soul-deep characterization and cutting observational skill that
make Mantel's trilogy such a singular accomplishment." --USA Today
"Hilary Mantel has written an epic of English history that does
what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the
Russians...As Cromwell approaches his end, cast off by an
ungrateful master, Mantel pulls together the strands of his life
into a sublime tapestry." --The Telegraph (UK) "Cromwell is a
character for the ages...The stunning success of the novels is in
large part the result of Ms. Mantel's skill in fashioning a voice
and persona that, while never anachronistic, make Cromwell seem
eerily contemporary...Mantel's genius is to make his 16th-century
instincts, such as a willingness to decapitate anyone standing in
his path, seem as plausible as his more familiar qualities." --The
Economist "The Mirror & the Light bears the stamp of Mantel's
genius; it's a richly hued mural of meticulous research,
enthralling characters, and expressionistic language. She is our
literary Michelangelo. In Cromwell, a striver who will do anything
to survive, she lets us glimpse the invention of modernity. Teeming
with pageantry, intrigue, sex, and salvation, The Mirror & the
Light reflects the looming tensions of every era, between those who
hoard power and those who crave it." --O Magazine "Mantel's prose
is rich and vivid...Mantel makes the past feel so immediate that it
seems possible Cromwell might actually manage to save
himself...Expectations are high for this novel. And it lives up to
them." --Vox "Beautifully written...The book makes for compulsive
reading; if it doesn't win its author her third Booker Prize,
there's no justice." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Brilliant....
Mantel enthralls with her descriptions of royal life, from its
bizarre rites and traditions to its practicalities.... Her research
is prodigious, her skill at complex plotting breathtaking, but her
greatest strength is her characters and the dialogue she imagines
for them." --Tampa Bay Times "This huge canvas, expertly painted as
always, offers many of the pleasures you've come to expect of
Mantel and her Cromwell books...Cromwell's execution [is] a
brilliantly imagined moment." --The New Yorker "Another masterpiece
of historical fiction...The Mirror & the Light is superb, right to
the last crimson drop...A complex, insightful exploration of power,
sex, loyalty, friendship, religion, class and statecraft...A
stunning conclusion to one of the great trilogies of our times."
--Independent (UK) "Mantel's prose is steadily and quietly
luminous, occasionally delivering unforgettable surprises...This is
a worthy conclusion to what is undoubtedly one of the great
historical fictions of the age, sustaining clarity, tension and
depth with a rare consistency." --New Statesman (UK) "Mantel's
trilogy--historically scrupulous, but quaveringly alert to more
recent resonances-- is one of the key achievements in English
literature." --The Spectator (UK) "In Mantel's hands, the story of
the Tudors loses all its heavy familiarity and starts to feel like
a custom-built vehicle for her muscular prose and savage wit, not
to mention her lifelong concern with violence and evil, religion
and ghosts...The page-by-page texture of the writing in The Mirror
& the Light is just as rich and interesting as ever, the pacing and
the distribution of scenes are just as lively, and the details
every bit as funny...Mantel's prodigious feat is to have given
Cromwell another face, one that he might even have recognized as
his own; she has cast a dazzling new light onto the tarnished
mirror of the past." --TLS (UK) "Magisterial...Mantel's craft
shines at the sentence level and in a deep exploration of her
themes...The series' first two books won the Booker Prize--the
third, rich with memory and metaphor--may be even better."
--Publishers Weekly "The longed-for final volume in Mantel's
magnificent trilogy is also a stupendously knowledgeable, empathic,
witty, harrowing, and provocative novel of power and its
distortions...Astute, strategic, sly, funny, poignant, and doomed,
Cromwell rules these vivid pages, yet every character and setting
resonates, and Mantel's virtuoso, jousting dialogue is
exhilarating...[A] timeless saga of the burden of rule, social
treacheries, and the catastrophic cost of indulging a raving
despot." --Booklist (starred review)
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