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. 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? 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. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on he has no great family to back him, no private army. 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. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. ‘If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?’Įngland, May 1536.
The long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020
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