The most anticipated TV series

Sunday Times Bestseller

Nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction

Longlisted for the Booker Prize

“It’s a book that isn’t read, but experienced” - Telegraph

“Her novels about Cromwell are, in my opinion, the greatest English novels of this century” - Observer

The bestselling sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel's trilogy that won the Man Booker Prize.

“If you can't speak truth at a beheading, when can you?”

England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, beheaded within a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are scattered into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith's son from Putney emerges from the spring's bloodbath to continue his climb towards power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles into a brief contentment with his third queen, Jane Seymour.

Cromwell is a man who relies solely on his wits; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite revolution at home, traitors plotting abroad, and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to its limits, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a country or a person shed the past like a skin? Do the dead constantly rise? What will you do, asks the Spanish ambassador of Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as he sooner or later turns on all those close to him?

With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel triumphantly brings to a 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, presenting a definitive portrait of predator and prey, of a fierce competition between present and past, between royal will and the imagination of a common man: a modern nation being created through conflict, passion, and courage.

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

Sunday Times Bestseller (08/03/2020)

Pages: 912, Dimensions: 12.9x12.9cm