Hilary Mantel is the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize for her best-selling novels, Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Both novels have been translated into more than 35 languages, and sales for both books have reached over 5 million copies worldwide. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost. In 2014 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
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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