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LoveReading Says
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013.
Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2013.
With her dazzling, utterly absorbing style of writing Bring Up the Bodies focuses on the downfall and destruction of the charismatic Anne Boleyn. This is the sequel to the 2009 Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall the second in what will be a Tudor trilogy. The final book will be called The Mirror & the Light, and will continue Thomas Cromwell's story until his execution in 1540.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012.
Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2012.
Winner of the Specsavers National Book Awards 'UK Author of the Year' 2012.
May 2012 MEGA Book of the Month.
Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of Man Booker Prize 2012 judging panel, on Bring Up the
Bodies...
‘This double accolade is uniquely deserved. Hilary Mantel has rewritten the rules for historical fiction. In Bring up the Bodies, our greatest modern writer retells the origins of modern England.’'
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts at the Hay Festival on 2 June 2012.
Reviewed by Sarah BroadhurstSarah Broadhurst spent her early working life in the book trade in both retail and wholesale until the arrival of children forced her to look for freelance work she could do from…
More reviews by Sarah Broadhurst About Bring Up the Bodies
By 1535 Thomas Cromwell is Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes having risen with those of Anne Boleyn, the king's new wife. But Anne has failed to give the king an heir, and Cromwell watches as Henry falls for plain Jane Seymour. Cromwell must find a solution that will satisfy Henry, safeguard the nation and secure his own career.
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Bring Up the Bodies Synopsis
By 1535 Thomas Cromwell is Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes having risen with those of Anne Boleyn, the king's new wife. But Anne has failed to give the king an heir, and Cromwell watches as Henry falls for plain Jane Seymour. Cromwell must find a solution that will satisfy Henry, safeguard the nation and secure his own career.
But neither minister nor king will emerge unscathed from the bloody theatre of Anne's final days. An astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists.
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Press Reviews
Hilary Mantel Press Reviews
'This is a bloody story about the death of Anne Boleyn, but Hilary Mantel is a writer who thinks through the blood. She uses her power of prose to create moral ambiguity and the real uncertainty of political life ... She has recast the most essential period of our modern English history; we have the greatest modern English prose writer reviving possibly one of the best known pieces of English history' Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of the judges for the Man Booker Prize 2012
'Simply exceptional ... I envy anyone who hasn't yet read it' Sandra Parsons, Daily Mail
'In another league. This ongoing story of Henry VIII's right-hand man is the finest piece of historical fiction I have ever read. A staggering achievement' Sarah Crompton, Sunday Telegraph
'Succeeds brilliantly in every particle ... it's an imaginative achievement to exhaust superlatives' Spectator
'Wolf Hall was a tour de force, but its sequel is leaner, more brilliant, more shocking than its predecessor' Erica Wagner, The Times
'Picks up the body parts where Wolf Hall left off ... literary invention does not fail her: she's as deft and verbally adroit as ever' Margaret Atwood, Guardian
'Mantel in the voice of Cromwell is inspired. When she is in full flow as a novelist, creating scenes and inventing dialogue, she is more convincing than rendering a recorded scene from history' Philippa Gregory, Sunday Express
'Don't think you can start this book whenever you feel like it - plan ahead, as, once started, it's impossible to escape its grip, and until it's finished, you won't get any sleep' Country Life
'Simply exceptional...I envy anyone who hasn't yet read it' Daily Mail 'A gripping story of tumbling fury and terror' Independent on Sunday
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012 Winner of the 2012 Costa Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction
Author
About Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel is the first woman and the first British author to win the Man Booker prize twice and the first author ever to win the Man Booker Prize and Costa Book Award in the same year. At 60, she is only the third double winner alongside J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. She is also the first person to win the prize for two novels in a trilogy, following her success in 2009 with Wolf Hall.
Hilary Mantel was born in northern Derbyshire in 1952. She was educated at a convent school in Cheshire and went on to the LSE and Sheffield University, where she studied law. After university she was briefly a social worker in a geriatric hospital, and much later used her experiences in her novels Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. In 1977 she went to live in Botswana with her husband, then a geologist. In 1982 they moved on to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where she would set her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.
Her first novel was published in 1985, and she returned to the UK the following year. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing, and became the film critic of the Spectator. Her fourth novel, Fludd, was awarded the Cheltenham Festival Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Prize. Her fifth novel, A Place of Greater Safety, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
A Change of Climate, published in 1993, is the story of an East Anglian family, former missionaries, torn apart by conflicts generated in Southern Africa in the early years of Apartheid. An Experiment in Love published in 1995, is a story about childhood and university life, set in London in 1970. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.
Photograph © Jane Bown
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