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Winner of the inaugural Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction 2010.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009.
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2009.
Costa Book Awards 2009 Judges' comment: "One of the outstanding books of the year - historical fiction at its best."
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 26 November 2009.
The subject of Henry VIII will always provide a rich source of historical, political and scandalous fodder and here Hilary Mantel concentrates on one of the most interesting times in his reign – the divorce of Catherine of Aragon and his split from the Church of Rome. Mantel breathes life in to every character and even if you feel you have heard this story a million times she brings an original and tantalising voice to the period.
You can now vote for the overall Galaxy Book of the Year 2010 - click here to find out how and cast your vote.
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Synopsis
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.
Reviews
A stunning book. It breaks free of what the novel has become nowadays. I can't think of anything since Middlemarch which so convincingly builds a world. Diana Athill
A fascinating read, so good I rationed myself. It is remarkable and very learned; the texture is marvellously rich, the feel of Tudor London and the growing household of a man on the rise marvellously authentic. Characters real and imagined spring to life, from the childish and petulant King to Thomas Wolsey's jester, and it captures the extrovert, confident, violent mood of the age wonderfully. C.J. Sansom
A magnificent achievement: the scale of its vision and the fine stitching of its detail; the teeming canvas of characters; the style with its clipped but powerful immediacy; the wit, the poetry and the nuance. Sarah Dunant
A superb novel, beautifully constructed, and an absolutely compelling read. Mantel has created a novel of Tudor times which persuades us that we are there, at that moment, hungry to know what happens next. It is the making of our English world, and who can fail to be stirred by it? Helen Dunmore 'Hilary Mantel's magnificent new novel
Bee Wilson, Daily Telegraph
'Magestically conjures up an England in the throes of epic change ... a Great British Novel'
Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
'Mantel has produced, all round, the novel that best delivers what it promises. It never lets you down; the prose gleams and she tells the story in an original and free-flowing style that will entrap you if you let it.'
The Times
'Ms Mantel's best novel yet'
The Economist
Cromwell has never before appeared as he does in Hilary Mantel
's dense, finely wrought 'Wolf Hall'!So convincing is she with 'Wolf Hall'
that it is easy to feel that we are seeing the real Cromwell before us, transforming himself from the battered child of an abusive London blacksmith
- the boy is bruised and bloodied in the novel's wrenching opening scene-into a cosmopolitan, accomplished Renaissance man! Ms. Mantel has demonstrated that, in her way with Cromwell, she is without peer. Wall Street Journal
About the Author
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Categories
Historical Fiction
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