The Mirror and the Light (The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 3)

Hilary Mantel

Mar 2020 · The Wolf Hall Trilogy Book 3 · HarperCollins UK

About this ebook

The Sunday Times bestseller Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Booker Prize

‘It is a book not read, but lived’ Telegraph

‘Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history ... and what a show’ The Times

The Sunday Times bestselling sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy.

‘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.

A Guardian Book of the Year • A Times Book of the Year • A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year • A Sunday Times Book of the Year • A New Statesman Book of the Year • A Spectator Book of the Year

Sunday Times Bestseller (08/03/2020)

Ratings and reviews

Complex and enthralling and lived up to expectations as a continuation of the previous 2 books. I grew to admire the Cromwell character and, even though I knew the historical end, felt quite a deal of suspense and trepidation as the story reached it's culmination.

Transfixed me utterly. Funny how, even when you know the ending, you still have to read on.

This series has been hard work but so worth it. Such a different view than the history we've all been given.

About the author

Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.